> Once you’ve defined lists as a number, 1 is suddenly a list if it wants to be. And this contributes to the difficulty of finding the right error message: what

> Once you’ve defined lists as a number, 1 is suddenly a list if it wants to be. And this contributes to the difficulty of finding the right error message: what you asked for is possible after all. The key part is more expressive power makes good error messages harder. Maybe Rust is right to make + overloadable, but not literals, which is how it makes the better error (as described in the piece), but I am not sure. Perhaps someone uses Complex number or Fixed Point literals a lot can chime in. Racket's teaching languages are the wisest of all. Beginners and experts want different things, and there is no good reason we have our cake and eat it too, catering to their needs separately while allowing full code interop.