The Author states that the program was so long because he was new to the language when he wrote it. Scala can be very very terse if you know what you are doing with it. I have had projects that went from 1K+ lines of c++ to 300 lines of Scala to 10 lines of Scala. The language didn't change to give me that decrease in LOC, I did. The more I moved from the translation of C++ to a functional design in the program the better i was able to express the code.