I wouldn' t say scala has a "fairly small learning curve", unless you have a solid background in Java and, specially, in functional programming...

From your article it seems like if it were a typesafe version of groovy...

There are a fair ammount of complex concepts you have to learn. I would advise everyone interested in the subject to have a look at the "Scala for impatients" book...

And in respect to performance, scala is (at least so far now) quite slower than java to compile (the compiler really does a lot of heavy stuff to make your life easier, indeed), but the runtime performance is almost on par with java...

saludos

sas