HDLUG Meeting – 05/04/10 – Recap

I attended the April Houston Dynamic Languages User Group Meeting this passed Tuesday. Jeremey Barrett gave a great talk on the Scala language.

High Points Gleaned

• Native on the JVM
• Statically Typed w/type inference
• More concise syntax
• Pure Object Oriented, Mix-ins (traits – kind of like an interface)
• (Sca)lable (La)nguage
• First class functions, closures, etc.
• Erlang-style actors (not distributed)
• Message-passing concurrency
• Operator overloading
• Everything is an object, including functions (functions can be sub-classed)
• Pattern matching – “Structural Typing”
• Java + Ruby + Erlang = Scala
• Lift – Popular web framework written in Scala
• Twitter uses Scala on their backend

Links

• Scala-lang.org – Official website
• Programming Scala: Scalability = Functional Programming + Objects – Book
• Programming Scala: Tackle Multi-Core Complexity on the Java Virtual Machine – Book
• Programming in Scala: A Comprehensive Step-by-step Guide – Book

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