Updated Proposal: Revisiting Implicits

I was really hoping after @smarter’s last comment that this would simply die, but if comments are going to be added on the tag end of this thing without going back and reading the whole discussion, then perhaps it’s worth providing a summary.

I made this comment about the proposal referencing typeclass definition boilerplate:

That sparked a series of questions about what, exactly, I meant by that, which I did my best to explain. Concrete examples were requested:

After this point, things get weird. I attempted to provide those concrete examples, like this one containing a permalink to one class which has that behavior:

And this comment, which minimizes it down to something that would fit in scastie, were met with terse redirections to go read the docs. This one is pretty representative:

Note that, on the whole, the concrete examples appear to have been taken as intended, so I’m somewhat dubious that the problem is on my end. I’d link the responses, but they’re temporally adjacent so they’re easy to find, and I’d like to avoid dragging anyone else into this mess.

Apparently, @smarter thought I was kvetching about either the proposal or trying to report a bug, rather than trying to explain a misunderstanding about the current state of things that isn’t addressed by the proposal.

I can see how, from their point of view, it was intended as a helpful redirection back on topic. From my point of view the terse nature and off-topic suggestions came off as condescending and dismissive. I’m not sure how this disconnect between, “Concrete examples would be nice”, and “go look at the docs” happened, and I frankly don’t care at this point.

The bit about the macros has been covered to death in other threads. A good summary of why I find this unhelpful and a form of “talking down” can be found here.

For the record:

  • I like the current proposal
  • The definition boilerplate, is a thing, but it’s is less than in Scala 2
  • While it’d be nice to reduce it further, it just isn’t worth it to me to continue to engage