Well, it's worth pointing out that Scala pre-dates most of the new comers you mention by several years. Kotlin, for example, their raison d'etre seems to be, "

Well, it's worth pointing out that Scala pre-dates most of the new comers you mention by several years. Kotlin, for example, their raison d'etre seems to be, "we're Scala without the complexity"[1]. As for the syntatic similarities between Swift and Scala, well, they're not identical (and the whole `var` bit on the Scala side should be chucked out as that is far from idiomatic Scala). At most you can say that Swift is more similar to Scala than any other language, which is to say the language designers probably saw some nice-to-haves in Scala and acted accordingly. For me Swift seems like a kind of hybrid ML Coffeescript a la Scala with a Swist ;-) [1] http://confluence.jetbrains.com/display/Kotlin/Comparison+to+Scala http://confluence.jetbrains.com/display/Kotlin/Comparison+to...