It helps to know some Java, but it is not required. Using Scala, you will learn the necessary parts of the JVM, without having to deal with Java-the-language to

It helps to know some Java, but it is not required. Using Scala, you will learn the necessary parts of the JVM, without having to deal with Java-the-language too much (which is kind of painful to use after Scala). Plenty companies use Scala, including most financial institutions in London. Given the adoption, it is unlikely that it will go away. It might not replace Java, but if you look at some metrics, Scala is the only language which is closing the gap between 2nd-tier languages and 1st-tier languages (Java, C, C++, PHP, C#, ...) and keeps moving up at a slow, but stable speed. Scala seems to get quite some hate from both FP and OOP camps, due to unifying both paradigms fairly well: It's one of the most expressive FP languages as well as being one of the best OOP languages. It manages that without exposing a huge schism within the language. This of course irks a lot of dogmatists on both sides. Considering the improvement proposals: A ton of work is happening here, and I think most people agree on which parts need further improvements. But it's necessary to keep in mind that Scala stands for rock-solid releases (regressions are considered blocking bugs, any changes to binary compatibility fail the continuous integration builds, etc.). Some changes need a lot of preparation to allow people a smooth migration while minimizing the churn; it's understandable that some people are unhappy with the speed and would like to move faster, increasing the burden on users of the language which want to upgrade. I think the explanation why the forks are not seeing much activity is that the developers on the EPFL/Typesafe branch are just doing an awesome job. Nevertheless, they did a lot of work on the infrastructure so that forks can hook into many parts of the existing systems, making it easier for people to bootstrap their own Scala version. (Yes, they don't consider forking a bad thing, and especially the relationship between the Typelevel project and the Typesafe/EPFL developers is very good.) TL;DR: Scala is rock-solid, has the best tooling and IDE support except maybe Java and C#, while constantly evaluating ways to further improve and simplify the language.