The code snippets are Scala. The first snippet is idiomatic. I can't imagine a team adopting Scala and complaining about functional programming though.
I've been there. One of the more functionally-minded devs wrote something to do with putting Keys and Values into some kind of json store, and a less functionally-minded dev complained about all the type variables - Ks and Vs I guess.
The article date appears to be around the time the company the author was working at got a new CTO who effectively said functional programming was banned. The Scala teams got broken up and some pro Scala staff managed out…
