Kevin Jacobs explains why Scala is a useful language:
Is it a functional programming language? Is it an object-oriented programming language? The answer to both questions is yes! Scala is a object-functional programming language. The good old well-known stuff is all in Scala. You can build complex applications by the means of objects and classes. On the other hand, Scala tries to teach programmers a paradigm called functional programming. In functional programming, a computation is treated as the evaluation of a mathematical function. So in that sense, everything in Scala is an evaluation. You might wonder why you would ever need functional programming if you are used to object-oriented programming. Well, the case is that in imperative programming you are changing the state over and over again. This is not allowed in functional programming. The changing of the state causes side-effects and makes your application less transparent. A imperative application is therefore often hard to debug while a functional program is easy to debug since it does not change the state. A concrete example is given below
Scala is to Java as F# is to C#.