So did I, the first Scala experience was shockingly pleasant (I indeed "couldn't believe my eyes" and literally thought "that's so weird, it probably works just so wrong that it results in an illusion of working right", it felt like magic and this way frightening): it either fails at compile time (throwing very informative error messages some of which can be unintuitive and seem weird as long as you don't know what do they mean but let you identify a problem easily as soon as you learn to read them) or just does what you meant it to do. But the programs I've written can indeed be considered trivial - I didn't make any serious use of actors or weird types, I mostly used it as "a better C#" + humble amount of FP but it seems to me that this makes my point make even more sense - write almost the same program in a very similar style in 2 languages and one of them requires a way less debugging.