Trying out Scala

I write Python & Objective-C most of the day, used to work for several years in a PHP/JS shop and have to code in Ruby and/or C from time to time.

I recently felt the urge to learn a new language which is distinctly different from what I know so that I can learn new things. I considered Erlang, Common Lisp, Clojure, Go, Haskell, Scala and Elixir. I plan to use it for server side web development and if possible for command line scripting (where I currently oftentimes use Python).

After much back and forth I ended up having to decided between Clojure, Erlang or Scala. I then went with Scala because it seemed to offer the best of both worlds: It has a good actor library with Akka, it has macro support, it is functional, it offers good OOP support (to ease the transition for me), and as a boon it also allows to develop for Android, something I may want to tackle in the future. So far I'm really happy. The only downsides are that the REPL starts up pretty slow (I'm used to Python, which starts up way faster), and package installation (especially of Java packages) confuses me at times. I still may want to go to Clojure or Common Lisp from here, but right now I'm happy with my choice.