It's definitely not the kind of language that you spend a few weeks or months with to learn a few new concepts. It's a language you learn because you can see yourself doing a lot of real programming in it. I call it the C++ of the Java world, meaning that Scala is to Java as C++ is to C: a more complex and expressive language that piggybacks on top of a hugely successful ecosystem and is a powerful tool for those who invest the time to learn it well. I'm learning it because I think it has a bright future in commercial software development, and it's nicer to work with than most languages that can say that.