I had read somewhere that there were talks of creating a smaller subset of Scala, one that's easier to learn. I believe it wasn't going to have implicit arguments (or conversions?).
I think Odersky had mentioned something of this kind. Anybody else remembers something of this sort?
That would be Dotty[1]. It's the same language as Scala but with union and intersection types, and some extraneous features stripped out (e.g. procedure syntax, XML, and `for some` types).
Under the hood it's a complete overhaul, based on the DOT calculus[2][3]. Already compile times are faster than current Scala (without any optimizations applied), and tooling will improve as well (Dotty fuses current Scala's type parameter and type member implementation into one, thus less work for IDE presentation compilers to do, for example).
Implicits aren't going anywhere, thankfully, how else could Spark et al offer such wonderful DSLs ;-)
I think Odersky had mentioned something of this kind. Anybody else remembers something of this sort?