macwire and scala-async are bad ideas in my book (having worked on codebases that use them) and I suspect the same of machinist and refined We'll just have to

macwire and scala-async are bad ideas in my book (having worked on codebases that use them) and I suspect the same of machinist and refined We'll just have to disagree on these sorts of "power tools", I think. Quicklens does a lot more for you than Shapeless's lenses, which to my knowledge not very many people are using for new projects at this point. I think once the Cats port lands, I'll be moving to Monocle for my own stuff, though (I think this will be the trend). Of course, the compiler getting better about inductive implicts can only be a good thing, but I do think there may be some upper limit to what can be done short of an effort similar to what Eugene is taking on with Reasonable Scala, since they are using a typechecker as an unwitting computer when we program that way. The work that Miles did to improve inductive implicit performance is tremendously helpful but it does not fully solve the problem. As an example, my very-induction-heavy codebase compiles about twice as fast with his patch enabled. That's nothing to scoff at and is super-impressive for a single patch, but it doesn't make the problem evaporate. I fully agree with you that it would be great if Generic-like stuff were baked into the language. To me, that sort of thing is the only compelling use-case for whitebox def macros. I feel like things would be better if we could just drop those.