I'm learning Scala

Being bored, I was browsing Wikipedia, reading about languages that use Java's VM. I was reading the Groovy article, thinking that it looked interesting enough to start learning it. But then I got to the end where Groovy's author, James Strachan, said:

I can honestly say if someone had shown me the Programming in Scala book by Martin Odersky, Lex Spoon & Bill Venners back in 2003 I'd probably have never created Groovy.
Groovy Criticism

If even Groovy's author thinks there is a better language, I thought I should just skip it and go read up on Scala. So first I read Wikipedia's article on Scala, then I went over to the Scala language site for more. What I read there looked interesting enough and I added the Eclipse update site to my Eclipse installation, downloaded some of the PDFs in the documentation section, and started to play around with it.

I want LISP, but I don't want LISP

LISP basically has everything I as a developer want. But somehow I just can't bring myself to touch it with a ten-foot-pole. Maybe it's the parenthesis ridden syntax, maybe it's the functional paradigm, maybe it's its mostly academic nature. Maybe it's my preference for curly-brace languages, or my preference for object orientation. Maybe it's those weird cons data structures and the equally weird car, cdr functions. Like LISP, Haskell and Erlang scare me. They have awesome concepts, programs can be mathematically proven to be correct, support parallel computing and more. Yet it's that very mathematical nature that makes me uneasy. Math never held much fun or interest for me. It has always been a chore, a means to an end.