That was my tongue-in-cheek remark about C++. Using a subset of C++ is exactly the same argument people have been making for years. The problem with that line of thought is that you're never working only with your own code (that, and the fact that Scala is not optimized for your subset).

That's the bad thing with a language born out of lots of compromises -- while initially a pragmatic choice, if it's popular it only grows uglier and uglier until it becomes the bottleneck of the industry.

If you don't believe me that Scala is ugly, try explaining a "Hello World" to a beginner that was never exposed to programming, taking the sample out of the official documentation, preferably without resorting to a cargo-cult style explanation of "just do this".

Here, I'll get you started:

   object HelloWorld {
     def main(args: Array[String]) {
       println("Hello, world!")
     }
   }

Compare this to the Python version:

    print "Hello world"

    main = putStrLn "Hello, World!"