You probably should have continued reading. Given the context I'm pretty sure that the author meant "Even though I hadn't...". See this quote a few lines later:
"Now, one year later, after writing 8622 lines of code in Scala"
I do not understand your inflammatory tone. The article is well documented and it goes into details that you do not find easily on the average post describing transitions from one language to another. There are so many people even here that choose work on a language for much less reasons than the ones described in the post.
I stopped reading there and started skimming, and nothing changed my mind back.
Many languages are cool until you actually have to support something you wrote on them. That's when you find out the real dirt on the language.