I think that Kotlin is very similar in this regard, especially because Kotlin borrowed so much from Scala when JetBrains created it. I’d have to work more with it to see exactly how it works for CS1. I value functional programming and the strong type system in Scala. Kotlin, because it was built to be nicer for Java developers, didn’t take all of those features.

I do expect to see some educators move to Kotlin, and I think it will be a much better option than Python (or JavaScript).