kenbot

Sounds to me like tests could have helped your code far more than any comments would have.

Scala's feature-space is admittedly crowded, but there is a method to the madness.

Scala's core design is generally to use a small number of rules to create a wide range of possibilities; the macro design they've chosen fits right in.

At the cost of almost no extra syntax, a whole range of things that would have required compiler plugins, special language features, or been flat-out impossible are enabled. It's (probably) a cheap win in this case.

Granted macros are a two edged sword complexity-wise, this implementation is no exception. I think this is generally true for macros in other languages though.

Scala's "self cleaning" reify/eval mechanism is practically free syntax-wise - even Lisp has special characters for quasiquoting and splicing.

Do you mean the macros specifically, or Scala in general?

I'm sure it's cold comfort to someone learning it, but I've always liked having English history baked into the language.

Saxon, French, Latin and Greek words are all readily identifiable by their spelling, unlike say, German or Italian where most spellings have been naturalized.

Regarding the for loop, it's not magic either. "For comprehensions" in Scala are a wonderful syntax sugar that can look like familiar "for loops" for Java folk, or familiar "do loops" for Haskell folk depending on how you use them. But they always desugar to flatMap/map/withFilter method calls that you could have written yourself -- there is nothing "special" about them in that regard.