I have not only seen the book but also read it (assuming you mean Programming in Scala). It is very well written and gets you started with Scala easily.
I do not agree that the syntax is redundant. To the contrary: an important part of the language design is that Scala enables the programmer to extend the language using libraries. A good example is the way collections and iteration work in Scala vs. the way the foreach loop has been added in Java 5.
Whether static type systems help or hinder depends on whether you work with or agaist it, and on the kind of programs you write. The Scala type system is rather advanced (in the sense of complete) such that it allows you to express more in the type system than other languages do.
For Java style programming Scala is just much simpler and shorter to write. When you have written some code in both you can appreciate the way Scala works.
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I have not only seen the book but also read it (assuming you mean Programming in Scala). It is very well written and gets you started with Scala easily.
I do not agree that the syntax is redundant. To the contrary: an important part of the language design is that Scala enables the programmer to extend the language using libraries. A good example is the way collections and iteration work in Scala vs. the way the foreach loop has been added in Java 5.
Whether static type systems help or hinder depends on whether you work with or agaist it, and on the kind of programs you write. The Scala type system is rather advanced (in the sense of complete) such that it allows you to express more in the type system than other languages do.
For Java style programming Scala is just much simpler and shorter to write. When you have written some code in both you can appreciate the way Scala works.
There has already been a comment on multi-paradigm programming, I do not have to extend that.