It can speed up loading of repl. `sc` will only materialize the first time it is used. It made sense to do so because as repl loads it spawns many threads and deferred initialization of spark context will only speed up loading of repl. That was the only intention, if it hurts in some other way perhaps I am not aware - other than printing of that message (which I suppose, we can work around !). Your thoughts @mateiz ? Should we make it a normal val ?