As early as 1999, Martin Odersky had begun to envision a programming language th

at merged functional programming with object-oriented programming, but he didn't

want all the restrictions of Java, the language he had done much of his work wi
th. What eventually emerged in 2003 was not an extension of Java, but a languag
e that was completely interoperable with it.
Developers like it so much that Scala won the ScriptBowl contest at the 2012 Jav
aOne conference.
Scala is a pure-bred object-oriented language and also a full-blown functional l
anguage
Graham Tackley from the Guardian says: Weve found that Scala has enabled us to del
iver things faster with less code. Its reinvigorated the team.
Why Scala Becomes So Popular?
Scala runs on JVM; takes all the advantages of JVM. Scala is platform independen
t, object oriented and strongly typed.
Scala has well structured type system than Java. Scala uses unified type system
as in C#. For an example, all the types are derived from the base type Any. Nothing
is a subtype of everything and not super type of anything.
References:
http://ignipro.blogspot.in/2013/01/why-scala-becomes-so-popular.html
http://java.dzone.com/articles/state-scala-2013