I think the only thing your hello world example proves is that hello world examples don't really demonstrate the overall complexity of programming languages very well, especially when you try to use it to say Haskell is easier to explain. Sure the Haskell version of Hello World looks simple but, once you get even a little beyond that example you start having to explain MUCH more complicated subjects such as currying, monads, functors, typeclasses, etc. Don't get me wrong I love Haskell but it certainly isn't easier to learn then Scala even if the syntax is less verbose. I don't really get your argument that Scala code does not scale to solve complex problems; I would actually argue that Scala does that very well. Now I will agree that some aspect of Scala syntax are ugly but overall it seems to do an okay job unifying object oriented and functional programming while remaining accesible.