The OP said Scala-like. A big advantage of Scala/Spark over Python is more compile-time checking: the code is much less likely to fail at runtime. Particulary helpful for production code (e.g. pipelines). For people coming from an engineering background (as opposed to data science), Python's lack of any static type checking for data processing code can be a big productivity killer. In that sense, Nim might be able to offer similar advantages to Scala.