Scala inherits essentially all its expression syntax from Java, including the string +. This was done because a lot of other things in Scala are new, so we did not want to rock the boat too much with changes that might seem arbitrary. That said, I believe string + is probably the most criticized feature in Scala's expression syntax. People are generally moving away from it, towards String interpolation, which is available from Scala 2.10.
Thanks for joining the discussion. Just want to say I'm working through the the videos for your coursera course (https://www.coursera.org/course/progfun) and, in addition to being a great introduction to Scala, it's changing how I approach other functional languages like JavaScript and R
JS semantics are those of a functional-oop language. It lacks a few standard functions (LiveScript has prelude-ls) and a ton of syntactic support for things. Once these are in place, you can write the code which looks and feels like Ocaml.
For example, moment.js function is `moment(dateString, formatString)`. In LiveScript I used it as:
parseDate = (flip moment) "DD/MM/YYYY"
Now tell me that this doesn't look like functional code :)
(The only really lacking feature in JS is of course TCO, but then Clojure, so yeah, let's just trampoline everything.)
