I took both and I confirm Scala course was less work than NLP. However that might be just because NLP course had much bigger and more tweakable tasks - on some algorithms, you could spend literally days to squeeze one last percent of accuracy out of it (and then end up overfitting, failing the hidden tests and having to start over again). NLP tasks weren't actually general programming tasks but more NLP-specific work - which is great, but it doesn't compare to generic Scala course. Scala tasks were much smaller and well-defined. I probably could use a bit more complex tasks, but being complete Scala novice before the course, I couldn't really - at least yet - do some heavy lifting with Scala as I could, say, with more familiar to me languages like Python or, say, C.