:) you made my day, thanks, same goes to you!
p.s. I created http://scalatutorials.com/tour as an attempt to get the basics covered quickly, it's very early work in progress, but I got good feedback so far.
Also http://codebrew.io is a great place to start playing with the language without installing anything (it even has code completion, and runs in the browser, no installation needed)
Looking forward hearing your take on it after playing with it some more.
Thanks for the detailed reply. You're one of the HNers whose opinions I highly respect. Wish HN had the following features like Twitter.
My understanding of Scala is very superficial. So my opinion is obviously very biased at this moment. I've been immersing myself in Clojure and ClojureScript on and off for most of this year. Learning Scala will be on my todo list for the new year. Hope I will have something to share then. I may change my opinion though, should the new version of Scala rectify most of the flaws, given the fact that Rod Johnson joined TypeSafe, who tends to have the gift to simplify complexities.
And no, I don't like Java either and consider that it's reasonable that the community needs a more expressive language on JVM and leave Java as a supporting role to write underlying performance-critial JVM libraries just like C to the native libs.