Scala is a very powerful, very expressive language. There are some features which you can just choose to leave out. If you do, you end up with a very clean, concise, and powerful language that makes you really productive.
I've literally had moments where I made my algorithm 5x faster just by adding 4 letters: '.par' in front of an operation. Instantly it got parallelized without my having to do anything, and the processing time got cut 5x.