[serialpreneur]

In my personal experience, Java 8 is a safe bet. Yes, it is more verbose which I don't like either. If you avoid the over engineered frameworks in Java-land its not that bad. You mentioned Play, which as others have pointed out is a Scala first framework. I prefer modern Java frameworks like Dropwizard or Vertx.

I tried to evaluate Scala after getting to know some basics & was thrilled at how concise code becomes in Scala vs Java. However, Scala does have a steep learning curve. I found that there were many different ways of implementing the same thing, which is time consuming in the beginning. There is opinion that it pays off later, I was not able to get to that stage because of initial impediments.

As somebody else mentioned, using Spark API in Scala was a joy. Same code in Java becomes several times more verbose.

At the end of the day you need to evaluate your team & develop a consensus. Your team might have some valuable opinions too.