Not to get on a Scala flamewar but for people considering this, take into consideration that Scala is pretty hard and with different paradigms, so if you ever want to do a little fix yourself, this might not be trivial. While RoR has also it's particularities, it is easier IMO to hack something away if you would need to even if you're not proficient in it.
Scala is my favorite language and it's really powerful and flexible, but that also makes code potentially really hard to read if the author didn't write the code with readability in mind.
In this case it was combined with admitting some of its trade-offs. It's okay to have preferences and even a favorite language as long as one doesn't treat it as a flawless gift of the gods that can solve every problem without ever being a problem itself.
After they're programmed for 20+ years in the language, and with them considered job offers or projects based on the language use, when exactly it's not considered "married"?
Easy to test on a case-by-case basis -- either a person can or can't drop one language and become productive in another in a short time. If they can, then they're not married to a single language, unlike cybernetic swans who mate for life.
eh i think in sufficiently complex projects its difficult to alter no matter what language it's done in.... its not like if we had RoR versions of every software we would be living in a utopia.
In my experience, readability doesn't really play into this stuff as much as how interconnected the code is, i.e. if there are some dangerous anti-patterns functionality that should be orthogonal becomes interdependent.
There are tons of RoR libs that are written in this filthy way. :D
