I think Scala is more of a Java and Haskell/ML love child than anything else. Having used both of those, I found most of Scala pretty easy to pick up.<p>The main thing I found is that there are a <i>lot</i> more syntactic constructions you have to be familiar with than in most other languages, because Scala borrows a lot from ML-like functional languages but doesn't really leave much out from Java, and then adds a few things along the way.