[dr0l3]

Fair point :)

The remaining piece of the puzzle is that Lihaoyi's libraries and general approach is exactly what a joe average coder would want. There is minimal use of advanced features, it is all quite straightforward and simple.

There are other productive contributors in Scala, but among them I would rate Lihaoyi to be among the least "magical". The fact that he is both practical and productive is what makes him unique. I guess my point was that there is a lot to be learned from that. For some nice examples of what it looks like in practice see his series of blogposts titled "how to work with x in scala".