It's also just really weird, when you step back and take a good long look at it, to see people getting worked up about hacky ways of doing things within the con

It's also just really weird, when you step back and take a good long look at it, to see people getting worked up about hacky ways of doing things within the context of a language that implemented sum types the way Scala implemented sum types, and that implemented typeclasses the way that Scala implemented typeclasses. Which, I don't want to be too down on Scala. Overall, I like the language. Scala's real weak point is its culture. There's a decent risk of cognitive dissonance when you try to wrap an ethos of design purity around a language that's always been a bit of a communal experimentation project.