The Scala Programming Language

On Wednesday morning I was in the mood for a more technical presentation, and "Scala: Object-Oriented and Functional Programming for the JVM", by Dean Wampler, seemed to fit the bill perfectly. The presenter was a bit surprised that his session was accepted in the Agile 2009 schedule, since it does not really relate to Agile... Anyway, it was a very interesting introduction to a new language: Scala.

Why do we need a new language?

• We need functional programming
• for concurrency
• for concise code
• for correctness
• We need a better object model
• for composability
• for scalable designs
• But we want to keep our investment in Java and C#

Scala is also a statically typed language.

Here are some references if you are interested in learning more about the language:

• The Wikipedia entry entry on Scala
• The official Scala website
• The Scala Wiki (with many code examples)
  
• Scala on Literal Programs - interesting examples