You don't need to fully understand Scala's type system to write working code in it. The features like Higher Kindred seem intimidating, but you only have to dea

You don't need to fully understand Scala's type system to write working code in it. The features like Higher Kindred seem intimidating, but you only have to deal with them as a library implementer (and in many cases the syntactic sugar e.g., %> helps gloss over a lot of it). Unlike with Haskell, type classes ("Higher-Kindred types" in Scala) are just one way to have a certain kind of polymorphism, you also have a more traditional type of polymorphism through traits and sub-classing.