&gt; That expressiveness can often come at the expense of accessibility&#x2F;readability, and IMHO that&#x27;s the case with Scala.<p>I don&#x27;t think there&#x27;s inherently a tradeoff. E.g. in Python you have to write &quot;(lambda x: x + 1)&quot; where in Scala you can write &quot;(_ + 1)&quot;; I think the latter is both more expressive and more readable, because naming &quot;x&quot; isn&#x27;t adding any clarity for the reader, it&#x27;s just ceremony that you have to skip over when reading. Similarly Python&#x27;s verbose, repetitive constructors don&#x27;t clarify anything (worse, they obscure the rare cases where your constructor does something different from &quot;self.x = x; self.y = y; ...&quot;, making it too easy for a reader to be surprised&#x2F;confused by those cases).<p>&gt; A lot of the popularity of Go comes from its explicit lack of expressiveness. I barely use the language, but the one thing I remember most from my time learning it is that I could easily understand every Go source file I found. From Hello, World! all the way up to distributed applications&#x2F;libraries, Go code was long&#x2F;verbose, but explicit and easy to understand.<p>I think people overestimate the importance of understanding a line in isolation and underestimate the importance of understanding a whole component or system. A one-screen class where you have to spend a couple of seconds understanding each line feels harder to read than a three-screen class where each line is simple, but (IME) ends up being more maintainable.<p>&gt; Meanwhile, I&#x27;ve never found Scala code to be very readable. It almost requires that the code be written with the same coding conventions that you&#x27;re accustomed to using. Even when common conventions are used, we found Scala to be counterproductive in larger teams.<p>All I can say is that&#x27;s not my experience.<p>&gt; Code reviews were significantly less thorough for Scala projects than either Java or Node projects were.<p>I don&#x27;t follow. Surely if people find it harder to read they should codereview <i>more</i> carefully (or simply reject on grounds of unreadability)? That&#x27;s what reviews are for, no?