Sounds more like a JavaEE senior enterprise architect who was concerned that he needed to learn something new, and thankfully found a reason why he does not. :-)
And now for feedback: the one thing that I don't miss is the Scala fanboys hateisms, such as that one. To improve as a platform, as a community, you must be willing to be open to opinions of others rather than mindlessly tag and bag honest opinions into stereotypes. When this comes into the Scala world, I'll give it another try.
You later speak of "hate" while justifying on the decision of one company your dismissal of a whole ecosystem. The chain reaction comment was tasteless and in no way looks like an opinion trying to make the platform better as a community.
If you don't like it, drop it.
Also FWIW in my experience with academics, most of them use Python, go figure.
-- EDIT
I don't usually reply to comments like this one but this time I could not resist. Sorry.
I think criticizing something that you decide not to use is pretty valid, doesn't justify an ad-hominem attack, and certainly doesn't count as "hate".
He's not hating Scala, he's just desperate selling his 5 years out of date opinion about it on every occasion he can find.