I can do both, but I also think that most of those questions are fairly relevant. I'd probably spend some time asking the applicant to translate between a map/f

I can do both, but I also think that most of those questions are fairly relevant. I'd probably spend some time asking the applicant to translate between a map/flatMap to a for-comprehension block, and walk through their "monadic intuition". But remember, Scala can be written in many ways. Some of us write Scala like Haskell-lite, and others write it like Java with less cruft.