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An introduction to the Scala programming language by Bill Venners
By Therese Hansen | March 9, 2009
“Scala is, I think, the most mind-blowing language that I have seen in the last couple of years. Incredible elegance.” ~Erik Meijer at JAOO Aarhus 2008.
Bill Venners, co-author of the Scala book, gave a nice introduction to the Scala programming Language at JAOO last year. Scala is part of the growing trend of multi-paradigm programming languages (designed to integrate features of object-oriented programming and functional programming), and as such fits very well with what Anders Hejlsberg talked about in his keynote presentation “Where Are Programming Languages Going?”.
Could Scala be your language of choice in the future? Watch the introduction and tell us what you think:
March 9th, 2009 at 5:14 pm
Ridiculous tedious Confusing syntax,
DLL hell was nothing compared to Closures.
Scala = Java – -
The worst part is that he didnt even show proper examples, just rut.
March 9th, 2009 at 10:41 pm
I’m really struggling, apparently in vain, to understand what closures have to do with the challenge of versioning independently deployable components like DLLs, jars, etc.
Also, I didn’t see Bill Veneers rut in the entire video. Perhaps he’s very subtle about it.
March 10th, 2009 at 7:20 am
Every stimulating language and well presented . great stuff.
March 10th, 2009 at 9:55 am
Very interesting talk.
March 10th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
Wow!
Tedious syntax?
val myMap = Map(1 -> “Hello”)
Map myMap = new HashMap()
myMap.put(1, “Hello”)
I think I prefer the former (and it is still as strongly typed.)
March 10th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
my guess is that LogicallyGenius didn’t get the “scale” part. So he sees that you can scale in Scala using new types or new control structures.
Feels like the author did not infor very well and just want to comment ( badly) on it.
March 11th, 2009 at 4:45 am
Josh’s comment likely got partially eaten due to angled brackets. Using square brackets instead of angled so it doesn’t get eaten, the Java code would be
// Some Java
Map myMap[Integer, String] = new HashMap[Integer,String]();
myMap.put(1, “Hello”);
Compare that with Scala
// Some Scala
val myMap = Map(1 -> “hello”)
I submit to you: which example is the more the ridiculous, confusing, and tedious?
March 11th, 2009 at 10:19 pm
If he co-authored the book like he gave the speech…
“…not programmed in a functional language like Haskell… that was me a year and a half ago”
He should have detailed on the trade-offs on taking things from Ruby and making them statically typed.
Also, he didn’t mention anything about the typing of “super” in Traits (Mixins). Something like “type requirements are checked against… in order not to violate static typing.”
April 14th, 2009 at 12:31 pm
I’m just commenting the commented code bits here;
A trick or two that reduces coding is not really a new language, it is merely a clever improvement. I’d prefer you call it a language extension. With the plans for more rapid Java versioning (from 3 years down to 1 year) I think we can expect to see more changes in Java over the years.
April 14th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
Having seen the presentation video now, my impression is that Scala is a cool improvement of Java, with way simpler code for certain things, and keeping backwards compatibility to Java code.
Like Python is minimalistic to Perl, so is Scala minimalistic to Java. And both adds more power instead of reducing it.
May 6th, 2009 at 7:52 pm
Great talk,
I think Scala has lotta potential and it is the thing to watch right now.
And for those lost souls screaming above about “confusing syntax”..hm… what is it you talking about??? Are you totally blind not to see that things are being GREATLY easier then it was in Java…if you dont see that….programing might not be the best fit for your future guys.
June 11th, 2009 at 10:45 am
Scala syntax might look a bit uncommon to Java developers, but if you have learned some basic rules it is very readable. Java is full of clutter.
Compare these two examples:
// Java
HashMap m = new HashMap();
m.put(”Pete”, 123);
m.put(”Mira”, 709);
m.put(”Dave”, 155);
// Scala
val m = Map[String, Int](”Pete” -> 123, “Mira” -> 709, “Dave” -> 155)
Java has no convenient syntax for maps, you have to write types, although the compiler could use interference.
June 11th, 2009 at 1:00 pm
The blog software stripped Java Generics syntax, hopefully it is now displayed correct:
HashMap<String, Integer> m = new HashMap<String, Integer>();
January 26th, 2010 at 1:39 am
Scala + clojure is a real power for me. I absolutely love them both.