#2 is perfectly true, Scala for me is a basically acceptable ML that can interoperate with everything else JVM, given the choice I would be using OCaml or Haskell. Integrating these with C/C++ is straightforward but I have no experience of calling Java from OCaml. Hmm, I ought to write a blog post about that.

On .NET they have it much better, F# is much more MLy.