I can't explain vitriol, but when I took a brief look at scala it seemed to have unnecessary complexity from a bunch of ad-hoc rules to simplify some specific c

I can't explain vitriol, but when I took a brief look at scala it seemed to have unnecessary complexity from a bunch of ad-hoc rules to simplify some specific case. Little things, mostly syntax, like the conditions for leaving out parentheses in a function call, or around a tuple, or braces around a function body. If there's a unifying explanation for all the syntactic abbreviations, it wasn't in Odersky's book. Some of the conditions for traits and implicits look fairly ad-hoc, but at least you can guess they conservatively ensuring some simple essential propertly like decidable implicit inference.