I'm starting to take this particular criticism as a major compliment to Scala. Scala makes it really easy to get stuff done and you're not forced to write functional solutions to imperative problems.
Also, I learned more from functional programming in Scala than I did when learning about Lisp. For one, Scala's default data structures are persistent and immutable, whereas the Lisp ones are mutable. Scala's library also operates better on abstract data types, whereas most functions in traditional Lisps operate on concrete data types, making Scala again more functional.
"Even Lisps are built on some primitive things, and those primitive data structures in traditional Lisps are mutable. I wanted the core data structures of Clojure to be immutable. In addition, I wanted the core algorithms to be based upon abstractions rather than concrete data structures as in traditional Lisps. These are things that can't be retrofitted in a compatible way."
I personally think it's sad that hardly anybody mentions OCaml or F# as alternatives to haskell. For a while I had the impression that OCaml had the potential to become really big but now it seems to have slipped people's minds. BTW it sounds odd to me that the author wasn't able to compile a hello world program and that he calls the error messages of the OCaml compiler incomprehensible. I could understand calling OCaml's type system complex (in comparison to the usual suspects).
And I still don't get the clojure hype. I probably would change my mind if there were a native clojure interpreter (like jruby for ruby) but the way it is you're tied to the jvm which precludes clojure from many use cases where a dynamically typed language would be preferable.
