That's pretty interesting, because I had no trouble reading and understanding the sources of the compiler and writing simple patches for it ... and I'm not real

That's pretty interesting, because I had no trouble reading and understanding the sources of the compiler and writing simple patches for it ... and I'm not really a compiler guy and not a type theorist. The Scala compiler is in my opinion one of the nicest code bases I've seen, considering the low-level stuff happening there.