Right its a problem that exists in every language, there is nothing novel about scala that lends it to being any more cryptic then c++, other then there is a different set of rules as to what can be used where. Operator overloading in C++ is just as bad as scala, but most c++ programmers are used to it since they have seen it for a while. The first time I saw :/ I was really confused as to what it was since that's not an idiomatic C operator, but after seeing it in a few places you get used to the fact that its an operator and you read through it, just like I would if I saw a << in C++