It' technically true that Scala's fundamental building block is object, not function.
But that is in my eyes more of an implementation detail. Scala is a language that blurs the distinction between FP and OOP to the point of meaninglessness. You can do FP and still organize your code into classes/objects/traits (aka modules). You can choose to do side effects. Or you can waive them and do pure FP (like in Haskell) with TypeLevel or ZIO.
> it's an evolution of Java
I would say that it's kanda the other way around. Scala is a beacon that almost all languages are converging towards, not just Java.
https://www.lihaoyi.com/post/FromFirstPrinciplesWhyScala.htm...
> complex language with many experimental and interacting features
It doesn't have that many features. Some people even call Scala simple for this reason. But the features that is has are _very_ powerful. Some maybe even too powerful for my taste (implicit conversions anyone?). And they're orthogonal so they can be composed together.
Sadly, such composition can be brittle and non-beginner friendly, especially when it fails -- things like weird type errors or weird unexpected behavior at runtime, or compiletime for that matter, etc. So Scala will give you a lot of rope to hang yourself onto, if you'll be blindly taking it.
But it doesn't have to be that way. You (or a senior developer) have to know what you're doing. Then you can reap significant benefits.
It's good news that Scala 3 significantly improves on this front -- it emphasizes programmer's intent instead of Scala's internal mechanics.
Sure, in some languages, this risk isn't even on the table (Go, etc). But having power also comes with benefits, not only the potential problems I've described above.
