I heard about Scala in a recent convention (JavaEdge2009) and everyone seemed quite convinced that Scala is a great language. The keynote of the conference was that the future of Java is not just a new JVM Programming language, but rather programming languages ARE the future of Java. Since JDK 7 will have support for dynamic languages built in, the prophets are saying you'll be developing in your own language in a few years, (DSL - Domain Specific Language)
On the practical side, I've downloaded Scala Eclipse plugin and was disappointed. The fact that automatic imports doesn't work yet, drew the line for me from an interesting language to a practical language. Although it may sound a bit whiny, being required as in the ancient days to manually add imports is too much for me.
