Scala is an excellent language from a safety and design perspective. It's biggest flaw is the lack of a corporate sponsor and higher barrier of entry. Map, FlatMap, Options are all really great but hard to grok at first.
Thanks, glad you like it! We at Lightbend (my employer) don't think of ourselves as very corporate, but we definitely sponsor Scala development. My team is hard at work on Scala 2.13 (well, except the part of it that's commenting on HN stories).