What happens when you don't have operators and sugar? You get ten-times-worse unreadable mess like anonymous inner subclasses. You get a dirty mix of a+b and a.

What happens when you don't have operators and sugar? You get ten-times-worse unreadable mess like anonymous inner subclasses. You get a dirty mix of a+b and a.add(b). And finally, you get a language that has to be extended with revisions of the core, rather than with libraries. Scala's operators are OK, but Haskell's are better yet because of the concept of a typeclass. You can't abuse + because it comes bundled with -, instances which support < are guaranteed to support ==, and so on. Operators actually have meanings that aren't arbitrary.