At least passing context objects everywhere is better than dynamic dependency injection. I'm in the "dump the logger in a global variable" boat too though.
I was somewhat in that boat too, until the first time I had to make several modules in the code log in a special way (that required some custom code), determined at runtime.
Mostly I just wish more languages had Lisp-style dynamic binding / "special variables". Logging is one of the perfect use cases for dynamic scope - you'd have your normal logger object/configuration as the top-level value of a global, and then let-bind it whenever you need to alter its value for all code executed within that specific scope.
Alas, about the only widely-used form of dynamic binding today is environment variables.
It's not perfect, since it uses JVM's thread-local storage under the hood; this can break when e.g. evaluating Futures in a ThreadPool. For variables which are rarely-overridden, like loggers, I do so with a wrapper that also switches the ExecutionContext to a new ThreadPool (urgh, multithreading...)
That's a neat post, thanks for sharing! I didn't realize Scala had dynamic variables.
As for the HN comment that prompted your blog article, I did a double-take reading it, because I could've sworn I wrote the exact same thing around the same time - turns out I did, though on a different thread :).
