Working as a professional Java and sometimes C++ developer I'm relatively familar with all the strengths of object oriented programming languages. From my time at university and from my colegues I'm influenced with functional programming, especially with Haskell; but never found the time to become familar with it like with OOP. But my interests for functional programming languages still keep alive, as you can see, I'm one of the organizers of the Haskell in Leipzig meeting, and so, I'm struggling with Scala for some month, but never found the time to realy explore it's strength for me. Alexander Dymo found the right words on Planet KDE comparing the learning of programming languages with cooking. It's is exactly, what I felt when it comes to Scala.