I love your observation about the two completely different points of view regarding “for loop, early return, and how to model state” – that’s very insightful.
I think it depends on the Scala code you’ve been exposed to. In my experience, there are two very different schools of Scala usage: the “better Java” crowd and the “almost Haskell” crowd. Or at least that was my experience when I was deep in the Scala community ('09-'11) before I switched to Clojure. I thought that the “better Java” usage would probably die out and a lot of those folk would switch back to Java… but maybe the percentage of the “almost Haskell” crowd just remained very low, based on what you’re saying you’ve seen?