I would be highly interested in the background of the friend motivating this article. Is he a java-only-person? Does he develop/know multiple languages?

I am asking this, because just looking at this snippet, I had no problem understanding it in a glance (which rates it as not complex), given that I know and was reminded of haskells and pythons list-comprehensions, a rubys block-structure and printf (don't hit me if these things are entirely different in scala, but this is how I just read it, and apparently, it was close enough to understand what this snippet does).