People who aren't used to Scala complain that it's ugly, but I find that language beauty has a lot to do with familiarity. Ocaml and Haskell seemed ugly (to me) at one time, and now I love those languages. Lisp and its parentheses? You get used to it after 2 weeks, but some people hate it at first. The sign of an aesthetically defective language is that it stays ugly even after you get a hang of it.

Scala may be The Compromise That We Have To Make. In the functional programming (i.e. good languages) community, we're so passionate about languages that we become factional, divided between Ocaml and Haskell and Clojure and Erlang and F#. What comes out of this is that we divide ourselves up into 1-2% silos and end up having to use Java, because people who don't care about PL got behind a small set of languages a long time ago.

I don't know Scala very well and may end up eating my words here, but I think it (or F#) may be the language we need to Get Behind, at least for now.

Scala is statically typed and can take advantage of the JVM libraries. It actually has a shot at becoming a major production language in professional software.

Also, what strong, static typing does to bad developers (spits them out brutally) is an asset to the software world. It makes sense for talented engineers, it accelerates the learning process of the talented-but-inexperienced ones, and it fires the incapable ones so you don't have to.