Well Scala (afaik) is a language which adds features from the functional programming world to an object oriented programming language. So if you only use it in an object oriented way you miss out on many great features. But yes you didn't say that, so of course it's an alternative to Java. But what I meant was: don't miss out on the functional part of Scala, it makes a lot of things easier. Of course functional programming is not the answer to all problems.
Anyway Scala is a language I want to look into in the future too.

By the way another language (family) not on the list is:
Assembler

edit:
Another one would be Fortran