Don't be. He's basically thinking out loud about two languages he knows very little about. It's an entirely content-free post, but because he's famous there's evidently a danger that people might take it seriously.

The fact that he clearly knows so little of Haskell is what's most telling - you shouldn't be taken seriously as a language critic if you don't realize that Haskell also has all of those scary things he lists from the Scala table of contents, with the exception of variance annotations (since it's not OO).

That was interesting, thank you for linking to it.

At first he seemed to be reacting more to Odersky's book than to the language. I wonder if he had first opened "Scala For The Impatient" how his reaction would be different.

Then he takes the odd tack of complaining about arcana in the Scala typesystem, and then suggests Haskell as a solution.

I get the impression that his love of dynamic typing had his mind made up before he even approached it.

"Then he takes the odd tack of complaining about arcana in the Scala typesystem, and then suggests Haskell as a solution."

What's odd about it? He seems to be straightforwardly claiming that Haskell has a less confusing type system than Scala. I don't know whether that's true or false, but certainly don't see anything odd about it.

What does Haskell have to do with dynamic typing? It's about as statically typed as they come. He's saying that if we really want a static typing system, maybe Haskell's flexible and powerful type system is the right approach.

It doesn't have anything to do with it. I probably phrased it badly because I was responding to two different paragraphs where Guido was talking about different things. You would be better served following the link to what he wrote and reading that directly.

I did read it, actually. :) That is why I was puzzled; he suggests Haskell as an alternative, and I thought that was a classy response, all things considered.