On: Twitter, Ruby on Rails, Scala and people who don’t RTFA

[jorgeortiz85]

In Scala, defining a method and a variable with the same name would be a compile-time error.

[carbon8 → jorgeortiz85]

A situation like the OP's would run in an infinite loop even in Scala. There's no compile-time error in Scala when you have a method call itself, which is what the OP is describing, and his variable also wasn't named the same as the method: "@name" vs "name".