Scala 2.8.0 Beta 1 released

[xyzzyrz]

http://www.scala-lang.org/node/4587

[mark_l_watson]

Cool. I've been writing Scala and Clojure wrappers for a larger Java project, and I ran into a minor hassle last week with Scala/Java integration and I read something that indicated that things would be easier with Scala 2.8. I am downloading the beta right now to see if there are any problems using it with InteliJ 9.

[mark_l_watson → mark_l_watson]

Trying 2.8 did break some of my code (as expected from reading the 2.8 beta docs)

[Confusion → mark_l_watson]

Scala/Java integration will always be somewhat of a problem, that requires thought and effort to get right. Any default way of converting between classes will leave some people going "WTF?". Jorge Ortiz's scala-javautils[1] can be helpful. Googling for these utils will lead to some blogposts discussing the problems of fully automatic conversion.

[1] http://github.com/jorgeortiz85/scala-javautils

[wheels]

Named and especially default arguments is the win for me. I couldn't bring myself to start ripping out our Java code just to have to do all of the same silly method duplication all over the place.

[samdk → wheels]

For me, too. I learned Scala for a project last semester and named/default arguments were the one thing I missed the most.

[_ivvf]

I haven't been this excited about a new programming language version in a long time. It almost feels like a bigger deal than the change from Java 1.4 to 1.5!

[qhoxie]

They didn't expand much on the improvements to actors and support for continuations, both of which are quite interesting.

Actors: http://www.scala-lang.org/node/2041

Continuations: http://www.scala-lang.org/node/2096

[TrevorBurnham]

Along with the new language version comes a new, completely rewritten Eclipse plugin, which can be installed using the update site:

http://www.scala-lang.org/scala-eclipse-plugin-beta-preview

[kashif]

This language makes me unhappy.

[kashif → kashif]

Apparently expressing emotion is bad

[andrew1 → kashif]

Care to elaborate?

[kashif → andrew1]

No not really - it isn't a concrete thing, its like a gut wrenching feeling you get when you look at a lot of clever C++/Perl code.