This is a bit of a meta-post.  When I first moved from Java to Scala (after several other languages, I started young), it was like a dream. Type-safety, elegance, a breath of functional style, and power, to name a few. It was like, out of a triangle where you can always only have two things, Scala somehow managed to have all three. It had everything I ever liked in a language, and I could fully live out my creativity in writing beautiful code, including all those abstract things that I had learn...