[buddhu]

"... in practice you will need to read lots of code with random punctuation used for method and function names."

In my two or so years of Scala I've yet to see anyone actually use /: or similarly named methods, and if they did I would make sure it never gets past a code review. Yes, the methods are still there, but in my experience people avoid them (even Odersky thinks they were a bad idea), and libraries with a lot of symbolic methods (Scalaz, and everyone's favorite whipping boy, Dispatch) are not particularly mainstream.

So my experience at least has been the opposite of what you assert. I would instead say that "... in practice you will NOT need to read lots of code with random punctuation used for method and function names."