I'm not super jazzed about where Scala sits on the syntactic complexity vs expressive power plot. Seems uncomfortably close to C++ from what I've seen of it, although I know that Dotty/Scala 3 is supposed to clean it up quite a bit conceptually.
I think the reputation is wrong there - Scala's syntax is actually very simple and uniform. e.g. a {} block can just be used anywhere to pass a block of statements instead of an expression, rather than having complex rules about which keywords do or don't need braces. Function application can be written without brackets (which I guess some people see as complex, but it's a very shallow kind of complexity) so operators aren't a special case, a + b is just calling the function called "+". If anything Scala 3 feels like a step back in my book - e.g. they've added a bunch of different syntaxes for implicits rather than treating them as a single general feature that can be used for multiple things.
