[scott_s]

That's not the problem, it's a problem. That is, it's a problem in this discussion, but I feel it has been dealt with well. The author's main point, though, was not about the specific example. That was to illustrate his larger point, which was about the complexity that arises when rich features interact.

[soc88]

The issue the author mentioned has already been solved in a much more easy and efficient way, without trying to use every feature of the type system.

Now the question remains: Should a language make almost-impossible and dangerous tasks easy or hard? I certainly prefer a language like Scala, which makes easy things easy, hard things possible and dangerous things hard, instead of the other way around.