No, Scala doesn’t have any dynamic typing. However, you appear to be confused as to what that is, because your post suggested a “static dynamic language” would be a good thing. Those are exact opposites. Let’s make it clear. A statically-typed language is one in which all variables’ types are decided statically; that is, they can be discerned from the code. A dynamically-typed language is one in which variables don’t have types (or you can say that they all have the same type, but the difference is a way of thinking rather than a technical difference). In this paragraph, a function or a method is just a kind of variable.

Whether a language is static or dynamic has no bearing on whether you have to explicitly give types to variables. Scala has type inference, so:

val x=”hello”

works, and x thereafter has the type String. That’s still a static type, there’s nothing dynamic going on here. You can specify the type if you like, e.g.:

val x: Object=”hello”

I wouldn’t say Scala supports most of what you want, because most of it is non-technical (large community, etc.). I can say that Scala is a well-designed language that you can either pick up and pretend it’s a better Java, or use to explore functional programming. It has a lot of syntax, but you’ll probably find that you don’t use a lot of it. About the community; there are 60 users in its IRC channel, and just enough mail in the mailing lists that I need to start filtering it somehow. The best thing about this community is its variety – you have pure functional people hanging around with OOP people and they can actually share code!

But my opinion would be to use Groovy and move on =-)

For what it’s worth, Scala has most of what you want today. Especially the type safety with type inference (reducing line noise) and well-designed closure syntax.

Nevertheless, it doesn’t matter, because as you say I am completely irrelevant so don’t worry…