small team could build something fiendishly clever in
Scala that's maybe 2,000 lines of code that does the
work of 20,000 lines of code
I actually provoke you to pick a language, any language other than assembler, and write a piece of software with both languages, of reasonable complexity (no micro-benchmarks shit), as concise as you can.
If the source-code in Scala is at least 3 times smaller, I'll buy you a drink.
I work as a consultant in Bangalore; most of my daytime job involves reviewing projects (for code quality). I see about 8-10 projects a month (Java/.Net).
There are projects which are just bad, let's ignore those. Those which can be classified as maintainable, are well structured and object-oriented, they abstract implementations behind interfaces etc.
But, they are verbose. I could probably accomplish the same thing in about 3x less code using FP/declarative constructs.
Reminds me of Yegge's Kingdom of Nouns; it is a funny read if you haven't read it yet.
If the source-code in Scala is at least 3 times smaller, I'll buy you a drink.