Indeed, I found his talk pretty poor as well. A lot of it comes down to not wanting to learn new terminology, and forgetting that a lot of "common sense" terminology from, say, Java, is also learned. I don't get more insight from "FlatMappable" than from "Monad"; in both cases I must learn about them first, and neither is intuitive without prior knowledge.

It is instructive to read Bracha's blog too, mostly for the comments where readers refute a lot of what he claims.

His argument against Hindley-Milner seems to be that "he hates it", and that type errors are sometimes hard to understand. It is true IMO that they are hard to understand (even though, like everything in programming, you get better with practice), but what is the alternative? Debugging runtime errors while on production?

He also presents Scala as a successful marriage between OOP and FP, but in reality this is a controversial issue. Some of the resistance to Scala (witnessed here in Hacker News, for example) is due to it trying to be a jack of all trades and master of none. Scala's syntax is arguably _harder to read_ than that of other FP languages.

Some of his "funny" remarks sounded mean-spirited to me. Nobody in his right mind claims that FP invented map or reduce, for example.

The only point of his talk I somewhat agree with is that language evangelists are annoying. Oh, and that "return" is poorly named.