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standard it might be, but I seriously hope IDEs would give a hint on what to google when a junior sees "<"...

try googling < or "scala <*"...

I kind of miss the days where you would turn to the manual, read and understand it, before doing serious work in a language.

I've had a junior dev ask me what kind of strange multiplication thing was going on in our C code base. If you don't even know about pointers, maybe you're not "junior" yet and should learn some more.

The asterisk symbol in C is heavily overloaded too; it can mean a pointer type, dereferencing a pointer, multiplication (of ints, floats, ...).

another instance where IDEs can help juniors by providing hover-to-show-name/descriptions

An IDE should just show the pronounceable name of that symbolic alias on hover.

Symbols are fine as long as they're alias names for fully written out names.

I think Scala will support such an IDE feature with an @alias annotation in the future. (I saw that idea on a slide in a talk of M. Odersky some time ago but actually don't know the current status).

Search features for language documentation should recognize special characters as such. For asterisk that gets very ambiguous though, unless it uses regex or something else, standardly.

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