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.
As someone who's done a lot of functional and OO programing over the years, I find it very hard to believe that you have multiple projects that went from 1K+ lines of C++ to 10 lines of Scala.
Claims like this are the sort of thing that make make it hard to convince people to try functional programming, because they think that FP evangelists are full of shit.
In C++ I implemented a lot of functionality by hand using mostly glibc and stl. In scala there are library's to help with threading and network I/O in my case it was A combination of threading (Akka), Network I/O (again Akka) and HTTPS communication (dispatch-http). So yes this was a combination of a better programing style and better support for libraries (SBT)
