Yeah, but LISP doesn't do currying and I find Scala's support for currying just fine, although the syntax in F# is definitely much nicer.

Also Scala does optimize self-recursive tail-calls and it's pretty easy to work with trampolines. This is a platform limitation btw, as you can't optimize tail-calls without support from the VM. Mono, the open-source .NET implementation, also has problems with optimizing tail-calls (last time I checked) and I don't know about .NET 4.5, but .NET 4 was not optimizing tail-calls on 64-bits Windows. I remember reading a blog post about them fixing it on 64-bits OS in the latest version, but it wasn't the kind of feature you could rely on in the past.

I do have hopes that TCO will make it into the JVM at some point, as there are experiments for it available as part of OpenJDK. Unfortunately the JVM moves at a glacial pace in regards to such features. This is both a blessing and a curse.

I do agree with you. Not having full TCO in a functional language kind of sucks.