I suspect that Scala is good, but I find the article a little disingenuous. In one example, the author counts curly braces on a line as part of the line count

I suspect that Scala is good, but I find the article a little disingenuous. In one example, the author counts curly braces on a line as part of the line count (when it happens in Java code), but doesn't do the same when it happens for Scala code. The constraint example leaves out the public method declaration, or at least doesn't illustrate how it directly maps to the Java code. Maybe it directly replaces everything there, but both snippets don't provide enough context to decide - at least not without already understanding a fair bit of Scala and Java code. That said, I did enjoy seeing some examples of more-or-less equivalent Java and Scala code.