J1 Session-Blog: Bill Venners on Scala
I met Bill several years ago in Basel whilst he was touring Europe… and what a nice chap he was (and presumably still is!). The guy who painstakingly revealed the inner workings of the JVN to us in one of the first readable books on the subject is today presenting Scala…
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Title of Bill’s talk: The feel of Scala
Bill lists a whole bunch of personal reasons for adopting Scala. After considering JRuby, Ruby, Groovy (amongst others) he chose Scala. He claims Scala gives advantages of bother static and dynamic typing.
The Scala language (with which I have no real experience) looks like an interesting mix of scripting, functional, OO concepts. It certainly has IDE backing as BV shows Eclipse, NetBeans and Intellij.
Bill is the principal developer of the Scala unit-testing framework. He cleverly uses the framework to demonstrate some of Scala’s language features. Finally, he plugs his book, which he co-authored with Scala’s originator Martin Odersky.
In conclusion: Scala looks like it offers a lot of power along with concise syntax. It’s not possible to judge, of course, whether it is “superior” to Groovy. Like any tool, it will have situations for which it is more suited and some for which it is less so.
