Avoid using tail

When retrieving everything but the first element of a sequence, do not use tail. drop(1) is often what you want to use.

Reason

Some collections are empty, and tail deals with them by throwing an exception:

Seq.empty[Int].tail
// java.lang.UnsupportedOperationException: tail of empty list
// 	at scala.collection.immutable.Nil$.tail(List.scala:432)
// 	at scala.collection.immutable.Nil$.tail(List.scala:427)
// 	at repl.Session$App$$anonfun$1.apply(traversable_tail.md:9)
// 	at repl.Session$App$$anonfun$1.apply(traversable_tail.md:9)

drop(1), on the other hand, will yield a reasonable value: the empty list.

Seq(1, 2, 3).drop(1)
// res0: Seq[Int] = List(2, 3)

Seq.empty[Int].drop(1)
// res1: Seq[Int] = List()

Exceptions to the rule

Note that this is not always what you want to do. There are scenarios in which you must deal with the empty case explicitly - as a stop condition in a recursive function, say. It’s just that, often, getting the empty list when you ask for everything but the first element of an empty list is perfectly reasonable.

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