> On the other hand, what is this io.Source.fromFile mess? I don't understand the alternating capitalization, or the need for deep namespacing of an incredibly

> On the other hand, what is this io.Source.fromFile mess? I don't understand the alternating capitalization, or the need for deep namespacing of an incredibly common type Not at all necessary, just convenient for demos since it saves you an import. "io" : The package is scala.io (the scala part is already imported by default). Following java, package names are always lower case. "Source": There is a singleton object in the io package called 'Source'. Again, like java, classes and constants (including singleton objects) are capitalized. "fromFile": A method on the Source singleton. Methods are camelCase. In 'real' scala code the line would look like: import io.Source (...) val fileText = Source.fromFile("data.txt").mkString or, even more concisely import io.Source.fromFile (...) val fileText = fromFile("data.txt").mkString Since methods are just functions (a first class data type), there's no problem importing methods directly. (edit: I also note that you didn't include all your imports, such as nokogiri, so it's not entirely a level playing filed)