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Looks like you are missing the point completely with your focus on Scala constructors:

Less is more. Nobody needs or wants the mess of Java-style initialization Ceylon tries to replicate.

  Ceylon has the notion of a value constructor.
  I have not yet found anything like that in Scala.

Yet another static thing in class declarations? Inventing different names for "static" doesn't solve the issue that you have introduced both "static" and "object" into the language. That's not a good idea.

  Also Scala sometimes seems to demand the use of the "new" operator in
  instantiation expressions, though I'm not clear why that's a requirement.

It's the same reason why instanceOf/casting is x.isInstanceOf[X]/x.asInstanceOf[X] instead of adding "convenience" syntax. You can't discourage people to use something and then provide syntax sugar for it.

Constructors in Scala are intended to directly initialize fields. They shouldn't be called directly, and are often private. Factory methods provide everything else, and are declared in objects, instead of being static like in Ceylon. That's by-design.

Because you care about the "outcome", not the "process": Scala did away with 90% of the mess associated with constructors, and used existing general-purpose features of the language to provide the rest (instead of having to introduce named constructors, default constructors, value constructors, partial constructors, and constructs which are "static" but named differently ...).

I don't think anything can change your idea that the thing you invented is the best thing ever (and everything else doesn't apply, because of the special constraints of Ceylon), therefore have a nice day! :-)

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Color foo = ...; new foo; // doesn't make any sense. If it's indeed a practice that constructors aren't called directly, then it's interesting to enquire why that might be. And indeed an answer presents itself: because they don't have names.

- Static members inside objects - Static methods inside classes (with new x() {...}) - Static fields inside classes (with new x {... } I mean AFAICT, the syntax for calling a factory method of a companion object in scala is exactly the same as the syntax for calling a constructor in Ceylon!

A language designer which doesn't want to give credit where credit is due I'm still waiting for you to retract that, now that I've conclusively demonstrated that Ceylon's constructors are totally different to—and more powerful than—Scala's.

the things we can do with union and intersection types, disjointness, abstraction over tuple and function types, etc, are just beautifully elegant and powerful. Don't let the fact that you love Scala blind you to other ideas.