

Scala – The Next 5 Years - fogus
http://www.scala-lang.org/sites/default/files/odersky/scalaliftoff2009.pdf

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davidw
My nose says Scala is headed in a good direction. They seem to get some
important things right, it's a fast language, it's based on a widely used
platform, and while there are some new things in the syntax, I don't think
it's something so completely alien that it will put less adventurous
programmers off.

I haven't used it for anything yet, though... if you have, what do you think
of it?

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codedivine
I have used it for writing a compiler for a research project. It is a great
language so far. Even if you stick to a subset of Scala fairly close to Java,
even then its a pretty big win. There are lots of little goodies. For example,
type inference is really nice. For-comprehensions are pretty sweet. Lists are
pretty awesome. Optional parenthesis for method calls is nice. And so on and
so forth. These little things make Java a lot less annoying.

Of course, the little goodies are the tip on the iceberg. There is a lot more
to Scala, primarily its support for FP but the learning curve is also much
harder for those features. Power at the cost of learning.

On the downside, sometimes Scala code is TOO compact. For example, stuff like
operators for list operations can be fairly hard to read without practice.

Interfacing with existing Java libraries is also easy. I have not tried
calling Scala from Java however.

Overall I recommend the language. Its mature enough to be used for real
projects and its a lot nicer and whole lot more powerful than Java.

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technomancy
> Its mature enough to be used for real projects and its a lot nicer and whole
> lot more powerful than Java.

Sure, but that's not exactly saying a lot.

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davidw
Actually what says a lot is that integration with Java is pretty easy, and
it's more powerful than Java. That means it's easy for the hordes of Java
users to jump ship, without, say, facing a rewrite to Ocaml or Erlang or
Visual Haskell ++. That's pretty important.

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jussij
A whole lot of nothing! Save yourself the bandwidth....

