Scala and other functional languages

[Arjun Shastry]

Hi Author,
In terms of scalability,how Scala compares to Erlang ? Erlang uses its own virtual machine where as Scala is JVM based. What Erlang proponents say is no matter how much memory available, one can create thousands of Erlang processes. There is no one-one mapping between Erlang process and OS-thread. Hence Erlang is considered good for server side programs.
Are there any specific areas/use cases where Scala is obvious choice over other languages ?

Thanks

[chris webster]

Some reasons to consider Scala might include:

You need to inter-operate easily with an existing JVM-based application.

Your developers come from the Java world.

You want to be able to make a gradual transition from Java to a more functional approach without a "Big Bang" conversion.

You want the benefits of a language like Scala only for certain parts of your system - e.g. testing, concurrency etc.