I just watched a great talk about Scala yesterday by Dean Wampler called "Seductions of Scala"
I've never felt comfortable about functional programming, (I still have nightmares about Prolog from my AI class at uni), but the way Scala mixes OO with the conciseness of FP felt good.
The Actor message model is ripped straight from Erlang, which is well respected, and features liked mixins appealed to my C++ heart.
Scala is on the list of stuff to tinker with over xmas now along with node.js and Go .