Hi, Peter, awesome question, following 3 points would be my best pick, but are not limited to:
- You write less code while having all powers of JVM.
- You can dive into an unparallel world of functional programming, while not needing to learn something like Haskell.
- It's fun, syntax is more mathematical and using frameworks like Akka with Scala feels so much easy and useful when compared to Java.
And it depends on what a person wants with it. If you are going to look for data engineering roles then I think Scala should be our first choice, even though there are wrappers around other languages like python, but still, Scala makes it much more fun, easy to understand, maintain and scale to large applications in no time at all.