[jowiar]

Seeing Odersky's talks, that is a gross mischaracterization of what he has said on the topic. There's a certain readable, elegant, concise style of code that is expressed very naturally in Scala, and if you take Odersky's courseras, it's very clear that it's something that was a preeminent design goal of the language.

The Scala community, on the other hand, got hijacked by a bunch of Haskell neckbeards who spew executable ASCII art over every codebase they get their hands on. The formation of the Scala Center feels like a response to this -- an effort to "retake" Scala.