Red Hat's Ceylon language has some interesting improvements over Java:

• The overall vision: learn from Java's mistakes, keep the good, ditch the bad
• The focus on readability and ease of learning/use
• Static Typing (find errors at compile time, not run time)
• No “special” types, everything is an object
• Named and Optional parameters (C# 4.0)
• Nullable types (C# 2.0)
• No need for explicit getter/setters until you are ready for them (C# 3.0)
• Type inference via the "local" keyword (C# 3.0 "var")
• Sequences (arrays) and their accompanying syntactic sugariness (C# 3.0)
• Straight-forward implementation of higher-order functions

I don't know Scala but have heard it offers some similar advantages over Java.

How would Scala compare to Ceylon in this respect?