Scala Syntactical Heartburn

This morning I was working through the Scala chapter from "Seven Languages in Seven Weeks" by Bruce Tate and discovered there are three ways to apply a cumulative operation across all items in a list using foldLeft().

We start with the syntactical sugar version first:

val list = List(1, 2, 3)
val sum = (0 /: list) { (sum, i) => sum + i }

The /: operator is just a shorthand notation for the function foldLeft and could be written out in long form as

val list = List(1, 2, 3)
val sum = list.foldLeft(0)((sum, i) => sum + i)

The first approach, using the /: operator, doesn't make sense. I'm not sure how I get foldLeft, inject, or whatever else you want to use to describe the operation out of this symbol. It reminds me a lot of the early C++ days when people would overload operators because it was cool and cut down on typing but took extra brain cells to remember what all the operators were overloaded to.

The second approach avoid the problems with non-obivious operators but just doesn't have the right flow for me. The second statement starts with list.foldLeft. This starts my mind thinking about C syntax with braces and dots but then finishes with a very parenthesis heavy block, which reminds me of list. This mixture of the two styles just doesn't feel clean to me.

Playing around on my own, I fixed my two objections by combining parts from the two

val list = List(1, 2, 3)
val sum = list.foldLeft(0) { (sum, i) => sum + i }

As you can see the block does't necessarily need to be passed in with parentheses but can appear like a typical curly braced block. To me, this fits the goal of being descriptive enough to read months down the road and maintains a consistent style. The fact that code can be very terse and symbolic and/or follow an inconsistent style is really why I've had a hard time falling in love with Scala. I just feel like Scala is trying to be all things to all people similar to how C++ turned out. While I don't deny the power it brings to the table, we should be focusing on getting better instead of trying to find multiple ways of doing things.

For now, I'll keep at it and see if I feel different later down the road.