[zaptheimpaler]

Another thing I like about Scala is its support for duck-typing like python, except it is actually enforced at compile time via traits and magic methods.

e.g you can define your own methods to sugar and desugar for pattern matches, define an apply method to treat a class like a function, or map() on an Option type - it simply behaves as a list of size 0 or 1 and that is all you need to map.

[danellis]

Apart from pattern matching, your example isn't like duck typing: it's all entirely statically typed. Scala does have structural types, which is a bit like duck typing.