Nobody has a crystal ball, and somebody could come up with something better (or something worse with a powerhouse behind it) anytime.
There's been a lot of articles, podcasts, etc.
Here on SO, I suggest you read: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/33744/is-scala-the-next-big-thing
Personally, I think Scala is promising, but may fail to ever attract the crowd. A lot of the production use of Java today revolves around J2EE and I don't see these folks making the transition. For non-Java users, more established languages like Python may provide all the functional features they need even at the cost of not using the JVM.
