I've been working with scala for about 1.5 years. My background previously was mostly Python & R for the previous 10 years although I had been working w/ Java a

I've been working with scala for about 1.5 years. My background previously was mostly Python & R for the previous 10 years although I had been working w/ Java a little here and there for about a year prior to switching to Scala. I didn't encounter any difficulty picking up Scala - my main resources at the time were "Programming in Scala", poking around StackOverflow and my group's existing code base. If anything I think my background with Python & R helped as I was already familiar with a lot of the functional-ish approaches from those languages (e.g. lambdas, maps, etc) As Kev009 pointed out, using something like IntelliJ helped immensely as well as it handles a lot of the boilerplate-y stuff.