Do you think Scala could succeed with a "Scala--" fork: "Java, the good parts".
Just a few things like type inference and implicits and case classes would be enough to make Java devs drool without getting scared by FP or performance scares.
You could totally use Scala as a language without the laziness, which can be quite a pain when doing perf-sensitive work. Traits are also a huge deal.
I don't think the community wants to go in that direction though. Who Scala attracted was a lot of FP programmers (Haskell/ML) who wanted to do work on the JVM; not Java programmers looking for a better alternative to Java on the JVM.
This probably depends on where you work, though. I work in the industry, and in my experience people using Scala (1) are simply looking for a better Java, and have no prior knowledge of FP or other languages which are not C-like OO. They would probably freak out if they saw a language similar to ML. On the other hand, the few people I know working in academia have very little interest in Scala.
(1) i.e. my coworkers, and people I know in other companies.
