You're not yet invested in the JVM, so have you considered some alternatives like Haskell or OCaml? I've found these to be simpler and more productive. The main worry would be about libraries, but that really depends on what you're doing. If it's web development, both Haskell and OCaml have top-notch frameworks that are very good for asynchronous code. OCaml also has a very good JavaScript compiler, so you can use it on the front-end. (Haskell can also be compiled to JS, but I've never used it that way.)
I have looked at Haskell, but the problem is getting the team migrated over. Its a lot easier to migrate a team to Scala then to Haskell. Also the library selection for the JVM is unparallelled.
Comments
You're not yet invested in the JVM, so have you considered some alternatives like Haskell or OCaml? I've found these to be simpler and more productive. The main worry would be about libraries, but that really depends on what you're doing. If it's web development, both Haskell and OCaml have top-notch frameworks that are very good for asynchronous code. OCaml also has a very good JavaScript compiler, so you can use it on the front-end. (Haskell can also be compiled to JS, but I've never used it that way.)
I have looked at Haskell, but the problem is getting the team migrated over. Its a lot easier to migrate a team to Scala then to Haskell. Also the library selection for the JVM is unparallelled.