&gt; You got used to &quot;this&quot; being a magic value, &quot;it&quot; is a pretty easy concept to grasp.<p>FWIW I avoid &quot;this&quot; as much as possible. I prefer a named self, which Scala has a nice concise syntax for.<p>&gt; Besides, it&#x27;s not any more magical than &quot;_&quot;<p>Like I said, &quot;_&quot; looks like syntax. &quot;it&quot; looks like an ordinary value.<p>&gt; which has, what... eleven different meanings? [1]<p>Sort of, but it&#x27;s always obvious from context. I have literally never been confused by an occurrence of &quot;_&quot; in 3+ years of full-time Scala programming.