I've come from lots of environments, and you're correct, I won't say "I love Scala". What I will say, is right now, if you are targeting the JVM there aren't any better alternatives (I believe in strong typing).

Maybe someday Kotlin or Ceylon or Java 9 will be better but for now Scala is the best choice.

At a guess, base rate fallacy and typing. The java community is huge, so even a small percentage of happy scala converts translates into a large absolute number. People from dynamic languages (Ruby, Python) are probably averse to Static Typing which puts them off.

It certainly does sound like a step up from Java, while retaining most (all?) of the good things.

Being a "better" alternative to Java (edit: as kasey says, targeting the JVM) doesn't sound like a bad place to be :) .

It's on my "to-try" list but the little development I do nowadays is on the .NET platform.

Which other environments do you think would benefit from trying Scala, or are bashing Scala? C / C++ ? Node? Edit2: it seems Ruby or Python people wouldn't like Scala. Me, I like static typing.

My team at a previous job went from perl / c / python to scala, and liked it better.

I was a python guy before I found scala FWIW