and so much harder for me to maintain someone else's scala code. It feels like statically typed perl, but that's just mho.

It is possible to write very cryptic scala code. Mine isn't, but neither was my perl.

At least with version 2.7, I actually really enjoyed looking at the Scala standard library code when the documentation wasn't sufficient for my needs. That's no knock on the scala documentation either, as I frequently look at the JDK standard library source code too. I've also had a couple of similarly positive experiences digging around the Lift code.

What other "someone else's" Scala code have you actually had to look at and maintain that you had problems with? In my experience, I only have a hard time understanding Scala code when it is doing something I'm conceptually unfamiliar with, usually something in the functional world that I know little or nothing about.

it's been a while so I don't remember the specifics but it was code for dealing with json in a lift code base.

Yea, you can make scala look like haskell, java, or perl with relative ease. Up for debate whether thats a good thing or not.