From my point of view 200 LoC giving me something I already have is a lot. From the point of view of your friend 200 LoC might be a very small price to pay for a good learning experience.
I'm also slightly confused as to why you think reusing stable, proven, and reviewed data structure implementations is a "good learning experience" as opposed to being SOP.
The hash array mapped trie was committed to trunk 3 months ago and was first released in 2.8.0.RC1 (which no one uses due to various bugs) and is now available in 2.8.0.RC2 (which very few people are using due to binary incompatibility).
In contrast, Clojure's PersistentHashMap dates back to 2007 and was in both the 1.0 and 1.1.0 releases.
I did not have the intention of backhanding you or your friend. If my post had the appearance of doing so, I apologize.
I just wanted to point out the (for me at least) non obvious fact that the mind behind the theory of Clojure's persistent datastructures is working on Scala's collection library and that Scala's hash maps are already backed by hash tries - http://www.scala-lang.org/archives/downloads/distrib/files/n...