Scala has an `async`/`await` feature (like C#) now, which hides the Future ceremony and gives sequential syntax. https://github.com/scala/async

I guess this does still require the `await` word, but I think it's good to have a magic word for "suspend execution now" so you can see where it's happening.

An OS thread still has to block on blocking IO calls somewhere, of course. There's no "syntactic" fix for that on the JVM - you have to actually port the blocking IO to nonblocking IO - AFAIK nobody can magically fix JDBC to be nonblocking from outside JDBC.