Alternatives to Java: Scala

When talking about a successor for the throne of javal, many people, like Groovy "inventor" James Strachan, say it will be scala.

Scala seems to merge the expressive power of the dynamic languages while still being statically typed. Even more, it allows you to program in an imperative way while being in its core a functional language. Lastly, it seems to have an exact "magicless" syntax developed by academics which is, by the way, capable to be completely re-defined for forming Domain Specific languages. Hey, and with many different kinds of Object Patterns (like the infamous Singleton) its even more objectoriented than java itself and lacks the need for a static keyword as well.

Sounds insane? Well.. it is. To be exactly, its main problem for java developers might be the fact that its functional, not imperative at its core. The imperative features more or less seem to be just thrown in for convienience and to make it easier to solve problems which are hard at functional level.

Still, to grasp the point again it can be used in conjunction with java, imperative programming is possible and its statically typed with countless syntax gifts to the power programmer. For me, its not even a question wether it was designed for functional programming. Nearly all programmers nowadays and as I suggest, at least for next two decades, will code imperative. So a lot of features which help you coding "the scala way" are nice to have but..

In the next few entries I will try to find out not wether functional programming is better, No! I want to find out if scala is suitable as a java-like language which offers closures as a bonus! Also, I want to find out wether the immense complexity of the language could be put to good use without programming geniusses:
If scala should ever be heir to the java throne, then it has to be used in an imperative way, maybe even in conjunction with the java libraries etc.
So.. I know have the following goal: Trying to find out wether