I'm not the biggest fan of Scala, but for me it's more that it reminds me of Java than the functional constructs.

But pointing at Scalaz is a bit ridiculous. It's a known test library for trying things out and basically not allowed in any Scala codebase I've been working on.

Scalaz is widely used and widely panned. Even though I'm a haskell and purescript programmer that prefers to write <$> and >>=, I find Scala's approach frustrating and hard to read. Especially as type lambdas stack up.

I'm just saying; the impression exists for a reason and the reason is a popular and well-known library.

I'm all with you here. I prefer Haskell and OCaml every time over Scala.