[phatmanace]

as a reasonably seasoned non-scala programmer who was fairly new to scala, I think that it's a combination of 3 things combined together. Implicits combined with non-alphabetic dsls (somewhat combined with the removing the dots from the method calls)

.. additionally, I always found the scala equivalent of the javadocs harder to read.

The end result (for me) was that I'd download, say an HTTP library, all the method names would be things like '/' and '?' - and you couldn't actually see what a minimally functioning code should look like due to all of the implicits flying around.

If you compare this to java, which was undoubtably more verbose, but was easier to take and unfamiliar library, squint a bit, and see how the building blocks roughly fit together, using a combination of reading the docs, and looking at the intellisense in your IDE.