Ok, first of all your Java example is five lines not six. Second, a lot of the concision comes from omitting type declarations. I will argue this decreases the

Ok, first of all your Java example is five lines not six. Second, a lot of the concision comes from omitting type declarations. I will argue this decreases the readability of the Scala example. What kind of data structure does getListOfStrings return? With Java you know with complete certainty that it returns a List of String (and only String). With Scala you have to infer it from the method name and hope it's honest. Likewise with the filter function. Whatever your opinion is of explicit type declarations, they are not mere "boilerplate". There are certainly other savings in your Scala example apart from types, like the filter lambda function. I'm just a bit incredulous that Scala advocates genuinely think this saves them large quantities of time over the course of a project vs. an IDE-assisted Java version. I mean, how much longer would it take you to write or grok that Java for loop? Seconds? How much longer to do it 100X in a project? Minutes? There has got to be a deeper underlying emotional reason why people advocate Scala -- which is not to invalidate that reason at all. It's important to feel love for your tools. But be honest about it. It's not about saving hundreds of hours of time writing boilerplate.