I think you're nit-picking at my choice of words a little too much rather than the points I was trying to make. For instance, when I said Scala was not worthy of your criticisms, I meant in effect, your comments aren't accurate! :-)
I can understand your criticism of well-defined ground rules. In Scala, it always feels like there are multiple good ways to accomplish a task. But I don't think that is necessarily a terrible thing.
Also, I disagree with your comment on OO and FP being at odds with each other. OO is at its hard encapsulated message passing. One of the things you can do with that is manage state, but that is NOT what OO is about. OO and FP can actually go very well together.
A great example of this is the Scala collections library. The OO features of Scala have allowed the language designers to create some powerful abstractions on functional data structures that makes the them a real pleasure to use. I haven't seen a collections library I like better than the one found in Scala.
I can understand your criticism of well-defined ground rules. In Scala, it always feels like there are multiple good ways to accomplish a task. But I don't think that is necessarily a terrible thing.
Also, I disagree with your comment on OO and FP being at odds with each other. OO is at its hard encapsulated message passing. One of the things you can do with that is manage state, but that is NOT what OO is about. OO and FP can actually go very well together.
A great example of this is the Scala collections library. The OO features of Scala have allowed the language designers to create some powerful abstractions on functional data structures that makes the them a real pleasure to use. I haven't seen a collections library I like better than the one found in Scala.