Jon Pretty

@li_haoyi @jamie_allen More advanced programmers have a responsibility to educate too, and they can do that by example.

@li_haoyi @jamie_allen If avoiding reduce((a, c) => a + c) isn't worth the syntactic burden, then reduce(_ + _) is worth learning/teaching.

@li_haoyi @jamie_allen But should it be that familiar answer: "we need better tooling"? IDEs with "language learning mode" could help here.

@propensive @li_haoyi @jamie_allen Racket has had *useful* language levels for many years. We missed an opportunity with SIP-18 I think.

@tpolecat We could, in theory, make more of SIP-18, but we'd need to control the parser and SIP-18 magic all happens in the typer.

@propensive yep, would love to turn off var, null, type patterns, is/asInstanceOf, return, overloading ...

@tpolecat I did remove null literals from Typelevel Scala. Nulls didn't exactly go away, though for various reasons.

@tpolecat Don't see why a similar thing couldn't be done with vars. It's harder with underscore lambdas because they don't exit post-parser.