I think the author hit upon some pretty good points. Several years ago when I started poking around Scala I really had to push myself to work with it and especially with respect to simple thigns like do I download SBT or Scala. One of the more personally frustrating things I found as a newbie is that the bulk of the documentation seemed to be written as a reference. Compounding that was the un-googlable nature of some of the operators like ":<" which really made things more difficult than I felt that they needed to be.

Regardless, although it was not what I would describe as a pleasant experience, after working with Scala for a few months I definitely found languages like Haskell a lot easier to comprehend. So, I obviously managed to internalize something. :-D