Robert Fischer

"There's a lot of functional programming in Ruby and Groovy, too. And more than a little bit in Clojure (being a LISP and all...). For mind-bending-ness, I'd argue that there's a lot more value in learning Clojure than learning Scala, because Scala is going to continue to enable your bad OO habits even when you're trying to learn FP. I'm underwhelmed with Scala as an FP in any case: http://enfranchisedmind.com/blog......" - Robert Fischer

"I disbelieve that Scala has better IDE support than Groovy, especially now that SpringSource took over the Eclipse plugin for Groovy. Although I'm not an IDE guy, so maybe I'm wrong. The bigger issue—which I think you're missing—is the additional functionality that these different languages bring to the table beyond their syntax. Griffon and Grails for Groovy and Cucumber for JRuby, for instance, are reason enough to have those languages in your project. Clojure's ability to do multithreading without descending into a world of pain (or an entire civilization of actors) is huge for certain categories of projects. And you can happily mix-and-match all of these things into your project. The idea that any one language is "the future of the JVM" is patent nonsense: the era of a one-language JVM is over. Why would you allow your bigotry and elitism to keep you away from using powerful, effective tools? And why would you throw out the contributions of a huge community (like Ruby) if you can..." - Robert Fischer

"I disbelieve that Scala has better IDE support than Groovy, especially now that SpringSource took over the Eclipse plugin for Groovy. Although I'm not an IDE guy, so maybe I'm wrong. The bigger issue—which I think you're missing—is the additional functionality that these different languages bring to the table beyond their syntax. Griffon and Grails for Groovy and Cucumber for JRuby,... more... - Robert Fischer