I've been using Haskell for several months, and I love it—it's gradually become my tool of choice for everything from one-off file renaming scripts to larger XML processing programs. I'm definitely still a beginner, but I'm starting to feel comfortable with the language and the basics of the theory behind it.

I'm a lowly graduate student in the humanities, so I'm not under a lot of institutional or administrative pressure to use specific tools for my work. It would be convenient for me in many ways, however, to switch to Scala (or Clojure). Most of the NLP and machine learning libraries that I work with on a daily basis (and that I've written in the past) are Java-based, and the primary project I'm working for uses a Java application server.

I've been mostly disappointed by my initial interactions with Scala. Many aspects of the syntax (partial application, for example) still feel clunky to me compared to Haskell, and I miss libraries like Parsec and HXT and QuickCheck.

I'm familiar with the advantages of the JVM platform, so practical questions like this one don't really help me. What I'm looking for is a motivational argument for moving to Scala. What does it do (that Haskell doesn't) that's really cool? What makes it fun or challenging or life-changing? Why should I get excited about writing it?