Functional or Not?

I have found some friction on this list recently between ``pure
functional programmers'' and people who see in Scala just a better
Java (or Python, or whatever). I think this is unproductive. Everybody
has his or her favorite style of programming. Rather than putting the
other style down, it is *much better* to write great
examples/turorials/libraries which show how one's favorite style can
be used beautifully in Scala. If you do that, my bet is that you will
convince many others to follow you.

Another think I've noticed is that people on this list have very
different backgrounds. There are highly experienced industry veterans
as well as people with a strong academic background (of course, some
people belong in both sets). But this means we have to take more pains
than usual to explain things well to the other category of
programmers.

Cheers

 -- Martin