Scala, is it comparable to Ruby?

I've been looking at Scala for quite some time now, and Ruby was my language of interest when I was at University. Disclaimer : of course my knowledge on both above with compared the Java know-how is nill, but I love to learn programming languages and compilers. That's my area of interest too.

Being said that I fund some interesting debates on Scala vs Ruby. First of which is very interesting and famous The great Twitter Ruby vs Scala war debate and the next interesting discussion on this subject is Ruby versus Scala.

Anyway, my view on these discussions is pretty different. I think this is comparing Apples to Oranges, because AFAIK Scala is a strongly typed language while Ruby is a dynamic language. Both have there own advantages on the space that they have targeted the language to land. Most of the people take Ruby on Rails to be Ruby which is very annoying, as Ruby is far more than Rails.

Though I wanted to write about Scala, I am getting dragged to Ruby :-) as I think I still know Ruby a little more than Scala. Scala looks to be a good stable language for concurrent/parallel programming. Further to that even though Scala has been positioned as a mix of Object Orientation and Functional programming, from what I have learned so far it looks to be biased more towards functional programming.

As a summery, I think Scala is a great language so does Ruby if you are trying to compare those 2 I think you haven't isolated the layers of your application correctly, as Ruby targets a different programming paradigm than Scala. Still learning Scala and hope to do some magic stuff with it soon. :-)

On a side note, after learning these odd languages I am wondering why don't we come up with a standard language for integration, (is that SCA, I don't think so) I am now dreaming to come up with a language for integration.... just a hint for what I will be doing in the future.