You can write simple scala, if you use case classes, type inference, wildcards, optional parens/periods, return "this" to make little pointfree method chains et

You can write simple scala, if you use case classes, type inference, wildcards, optional parens/periods, return "this" to make little pointfree method chains etc. You also need to avoid parameterized types and many corners of the type system that go with them. Look in Subramaniam's Pragmatic Press book on scala, you'll see lots of simple code that any ruby/PHP dev can grok, for analytics, sysadmin etc. Now it's true that a lot of people don't choose to write simple scala. Scala has a lot of features that other language designers know they need. Look how proud Hjelsberg was of co- and contravariance in C# 4.0 (I don't have a video waypoint, it's about 2/3 of way thru http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/matthijs/C-40-and-beyond-by-Anders-Hejlsberg http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/matthijs/C-40-and-beyond-by-A... (Also look at Learn You Haskell, for pretty straightforward haskell code (straightforward because he didn't have page-space to go into a lot of GHC extensions and advanced stuff)