Your concerns resonate with me. I think in most cases, particularly in commercial software development, we should value clarity, familiarity, and maintainabilit

Your concerns resonate with me. I think in most cases, particularly in commercial software development, we should value clarity, familiarity, and maintainability over cleverness, expressiveness, and terseness. I think that like Haskell, Scala's flexibility tends to take some people off into the weeds. See, for example, Coda Hale's concerns about using Scala at Yammer, from about 2 years ago: http://codahale.com/downloads/email-to-donald.txt http://codahale.com/downloads/email-to-donald.txt However, I think we need to be careful not to overvalue familiarity. Rich Hickey's talk "Simple Made Easy" is well-known, and I think he's correct to tell us that we should value simplicity over ease. I guess the answer is to use functional programming to make our software simpler, and not let cleverness take us off into the weeds.