[yakcyll]

Definitely! I'm just hoping for this 'aha!' moment, since it just feels like black magic for me.

I think conservative approach to fundamentals is a great way to build a robust language and the way it's presented to me suggests that's one of the objectives; however, for an outsider with experience in other, more lenient (and, obviously, bug-prone) languages, those constraints might appear too restrictive. I believe it's a transitional feeling though, hence calling them 'seemingly' arbitrary.

[steveklabnik]

Totally. I'm actually re-doing all of the docs on this stuff right now, I hope that the next iteration will maybe make it easier to grok. We'll see!