[defpan]

I totally agree with the author. The one's mentioned in the article are really the key benefits. I really wish scala didn't have implicits. People go crazy with implicits resulting in very difficult to read code. Sometimes I feel like going back to java just for the readability and then I remember these nice features of scala. We need a scala minus implicits.

[maest]

> We need a scala minus implicits.

Look forward to dotty, then, Odersky's new project.

http://jaxenter.com/dotty-scala-without-the-backwards-compat...

[frowaway001]

> We need a scala minus implicits.

I don't find the idea of programming without typeclasses appealing – at all.

[rld]

Just out of curiosity, which libraries or frameworks do you feel abuse implicits?

[defpan]

Sorry, I don't want to blame any frameworks in particular. There's already too much bad blood in scala land. Let's just say there have been many instances where I had a really hard time understanding a piece of code and it turned out there was an implicit conversion hidden somewhere out of sight that was the missing piece of the puzzle, and in most instances there would have been a simpler design without implicits. Most great pieces of software, such as unix, are great not because they use very complicated concepts but because of how simple they are. Finding that simplicity is the key. Very frequently people don't see the importance of simple things like the presence of hints in code to where the related pieces are. Implicits break this flow. The number of places implicit conversions can be defined at is mind boggling. And even when some code doesn't use implicits the possibility of implicits does harm. When you don't understand some code, well who knows there may be an implicit conversion in play.