Scala is a modern, statically-typed programming language that smoothly integrates features of object-oriented and functional languages while staying fully interoperable with Java. Scala allows a conciseness of code comparable to scripting languages but has at the same time a strong and static type system. In this way, common programming patterns can be expressed in a concise, elegant, and type-safe way. Scala also enables the creation of embedded domain-specific languages that hide much of the complexity of traditional APIs from users. In this talk I will also show how Scala's general abstraction mechanisms can be used to implement higher-level concurrency models that are both efficient and easy to use. The Scala Actors framework aims to make concurrent programming in a JVM-based system much more accessible than previous techniques.