[whatcanthisbee]

standard it might be, but I seriously hope IDEs would give a hint on what to google when a junior sees "<"...

try googling < or "scala <*"...

[hendi_]

I kind of miss the days where you would turn to the manual, read and understand it, before doing serious work in a language.

I've had a junior dev ask me what kind of strange multiplication thing was going on in our C code base. If you don't even know about pointers, maybe you're not "junior" yet and should learn some more.

[chriswarbo]

The asterisk symbol in C is heavily overloaded too; it can mean a pointer type, dereferencing a pointer, multiplication (of ints, floats, ...).

[whatcanthisbee]

another instance where IDEs can help juniors by providing hover-to-show-name/descriptions

[still_grokking]

An IDE should just show the pronounceable name of that symbolic alias on hover.

Symbols are fine as long as they're alias names for fully written out names.

I think Scala will support such an IDE feature with an @alias annotation in the future. (I saw that idea on a slide in a talk of M. Odersky some time ago but actually don't know the current status).

[posterboy]

Search features for language documentation should recognize special characters as such. For asterisk that gets very ambiguous though, unless it uses regex or something else, standardly.