In the early days of Scala people went wild writing DSLs. Most of these have lost popularity as we've realised this style of code doesn't deliver value outside of niche domains. I think ScalaTest is only library in common use that still uses this style.
It was definitely a wild ride. I never really liked the "wordy" style, but operator precedence in symbolic DSLs was an enabler for some quite intuitive DSLs which were able to avoid a lot of parentheses. That said, they're still super niche.
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The main problem with symbolic DSLs in Scala, IMO, is that discoverability is really poor. You often have to chase a lot of implicits to find what you want.
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I hope that discoverability will be better with the improved tooling (and lessee need for implicits) we're getting, but I'd probably say that symbolic DSLs like parser combinators really need to be *taught* rather than discovered. Not always how it happens, though...
End of conversation
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