Comment by nickbauman

Nothing against Scala here at all. But I've heard that if you try to learn Mandarin as an adult westerner, you will never get to a point of conversational comfort in the language, let alone sound like you have native mastery of it: it's too complex and has tonality that westerners don't have anything to compare to. So this is a particularly poor choice of analogy if you're trying to make a case for Scala.