I get blank stares and even hostility sometimes from very competent engineers when I try to explain the Java type system is not the end-all be-all of type systems and that it is in fact... not all that powerful or particularly safe either.
To be clear, I have a horse in this race: I teach Scala (and have written a book on it, which you can find here: http://underscore.io/training/courses/essential-scala/). I also strongly believe Scala has been held back by poor teaching.
For example, in Portugal many companies do require a CS or EE degree, which means everyone has been exposed to those terms, at least if they enjoyed a degree in universities like IST, UNL/FCT, UC and similar.
Just as an example, back on my day, the Prolog and LP classes were shared between CS and EE degrees.
Furthermore I found "Effective Scala" to be rather random in its presentation. I've found it much more effective to concentrate on the core Scala patterns (i.e. algebraic data types, type classes) and present language features in the context of the patterns they support.