> Scala as a better Java any more than I would Python as a better C

The difference between Python and C is huge because C is not interpreted and doesn't do automatic memory management, which is actually the deal breaker for many apps. Saying that such a difference exists between Scala and Java is simply wrong. It's wrong starting from the fact that both are garbage collected, running on top of the same VM, having the same performance and thus targeting the same application profiles.

> Scala is maybe a "worse Haskell", with extensive Java interoperability

Haskell is a language I like and that I'm in the process of grokking, being a continuous inspiration, but to tell you the truth, to the contrary I think Haskell is a less practical Scala. Scala follows the pragmatism of the ML family. OCaml is another pragmatic language. Clojure and Racket are too.

Empirically speaking, Haskell is good at being a trend setter in the FP community, but besides really cool libraries and concepts, I don't see much in the way of applications built by Haskell folks. Some big companies have built complex systems on top of Scala, not to mention projects like Kafka and Spark, which can also credit Java and the JVM. For OCaml, even with a much smaller community than both Scala and Haskell, you have some really cool stuff like MirageOS. What does Haskell have to show for, besides badly documented libraries and compiler implementations?

Don't get me wrong, correlation does not imply causation, maybe Haskell simply has a popularity problem, but the onus is on the Haskell community to prove that Scala, OCaml and others are inferior alternatives to Haskell by showing some results. Because at the end of the day it's the final artifacts that really matter.