My second look at Scala

Second impressions are not so good I'm afraid. Unfortunately Scala is full of power tools and so its very easy to hurt yourself or others. Take operator overloading for example.

I like operator overloading when the operator itself carries with it a sufficient context to understand what's going on, e.g., + means addition and addition has certain properties that are well understood. What does this mean >;> frankly I have no idea. So how is naming a function with >;> helpful? I've found it pretty useful to have functions have meaningful names, sometimes its the only documentation you get and good names can lead to self documenting code. But >;> is not helpful.

Implicit type conversions are great, if used carefully. But they give me nightmares of completely illegible code. Code that you cannot read outside of an IDE. Code that requires context sensitive help just to know what type you have. Mixins are similarly scary.

All of these feel like ways that inexperienced developers could destroy the productivity of experienced developers by writing unreadable code, and by implicitly modifying the behavior of code written by others.

Anyway, the upshot for me is that Scala still seems very interesting but absent a set of coding conventions I would be terrified of using it for a big project. I wonder if such a set of conventions exists.