consistent, concise, avoids ascii-art APIs Led by JetBrains – good tooling from the outset Open source – but not a huge community Modern-ish type system - type inference, null safe, generics, lambdas, declaration-site variance - but no type classes, higher-kinded types Fast compile times – as good as Java Easy interop with existing Java APIs - maybe too easy? Good for Android - almost no runtime, compiles to Java 6 bytecode Scala