The difference is how easy a language makes it to hang ones self, or how many ropes are lying around to do it with. I think the article touches on it aptly. It's not so much a fault of the language (one can debate the semantics of it), so much as it is an outcome of greater-than n-sized (where n is 1, 2, maybe 3) non-high-expert-Scala-users teams. The lack of an easy to grok idiomatic way of writing code is hard on a team. It bothers me when I write code and don't know the idiomatic way of doing it, and I'll often solicit feedback and rewrite it just for my own sake (really, on code that no one else will ever really see or touch).