is Gatling good choice for performance testing newbie if I'm lacking some advanced Scala knowledge, especially functional paradigm? I managed to adopt some basics in a short time, nothing more than that.
Is there anything more appropriate for the one coming from Java development world?
Gatling is strongly depended on its own DSL, so you may say that you write simulations "in Gatling DSL" not "in Scala". Of course as it is Scala based tool you will need at least basic knowledge of language, but proficiency is not required. If you would use some more complex features some knowledge of functional programming (lambdas especially) would be required but its something you can learn when you start to use Gatling.