Scala, a Statically Typed, Functional, O-O Language

inkslinger77 notes a Computerworld interview with Martin Odersky on the Scala language, which is getting a lot of attention from its use on high-profile sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn. The strongly typed language is intended to be a usable melding of functional and object-oriented programming techniques. "My co-workers and I spend a lot of time writing code so we wanted to have something that was a joy to program in. That was a very definite goal. We wanted to remove as many of the incantations of traditional high-protocol languages as possible and give Scala great expressiveness so that developers can model things in the ways they want to. ... You can express Scala programs in several ways. You can make them look very much like Java programs which is nice for programmers who start out coming from Java. ... But you can also express Scala programs in a purely functional way and those programs can end up looking quite different from typical Java programs. Often they are much more concise. ... Twitter has been able to sustain phenomenal growth, and it seems with more stability than what they had before the switch, so I think that's a good testament to Scala. ... [W]e are looking at new ways to program multicore processors and other parallel systems. We already have a head start here because Scala has a popular actor system which gives you a high-level way to express concurrency. ... The interesting thing is that actors in Scala are not a language feature, they have been done purely as a Scala library. So they are a good witness to Scala's flexibility..."

Comments

Re:Not sold on Scala

[Anonymous Coward]

You just said a lot of meaningless stuff. If you could write some specifics instead of this rather generalized rant I'd appreciate it.

Re:Oooooooohhhh....

[gestalt_n_pepper]

Ummm. No.

Been both self-employed and employed by others in life. Plenty of choices. Most are lousy economic dead-ends (Gee! I think I'll learn Modula-2!). Recognizing this is highly adaptive. Ignoring it, highly maladaptive.

Note: If the best engineering always won, would we all be using (ugh) Windows?

I repeat, Software is about money or masturbation. Learn the difference.

Re:Oooooooohhhh....

[gestalt_n_pepper]

Touche'

Not bad if it's understood that it's the commonly practiced entertainment/educational activity noted earlier (Not that there's anything wrong with that!).