This! Don't be fooled by the prevalence of Haskell-like libraries and patterns in the Scala community (or a vocal subset). Those are absolutely useful but you're free to use them or not, and if you want to just write ML style functional code then Scala is great for that too.

There is actually a really interesting (to me) discussion going on about where Scala sits on the Intersection of Java,ML & Haskell going on in the r/Scala subreddit at the moment:

https://www.reddit.com/r/scala/comments/5sv1w5/the_divergenc...