I've seen this, too, but Scala's complexity does become more manageable with time. Slick seems to make a trade-off for a very nice API, at the cost of complex u

I've seen this, too, but Scala's complexity does become more manageable with time. Slick seems to make a trade-off for a very nice API, at the cost of complex underlying code — which you sometimes need to understand when you want to use Type mappers and such. There's several Scala libraries that are on the border of "too clever". One is Play's Iteratees: it's a really nice concept, they take a few days to wrap your mind around. Trying to get a Java programmer to understand them borders on a lost cause.