Anybody using Scala?

[jespdj]

Have you heard about the Scala programming language (http://www.scala-lang.org/)? It's an advanced language that combines object oriented and functional programming features. It runs on the Java virtual machine.

I'm learning it, and it's a very interesting and powerful language, but it's not easy - compared to Java (my main programming language) it has a lot of new features and ideas.

So, has anybody else looked at it, and what are your experiences learning Scala?

[CptPicard]

I've done some Scala... it's interesting in a way, but I find it a bit too over-complex for its own good. Being a Lisp geek, my functional-programming-on-JVM interests are currently being well satisfied by Clojure.. :)

[jespdj]

I was at the JavaOne conference from the 2nd to the 5th of June, in San Francisco. There were a number of talks about Scala there.

I went to a meeting of the Bay Area Scala Enthusiasts (http://groups.google.com/group/scala-base) which was held at the headquarters of Twitter, which was just three blocks from the Moscone center where JavaOne was held. Scala's inventor Martin Odersky was there, talking about new features in the coming version 2.8 of Scala. It was very interesting, although I didn't understand all of it since I don't know Scala well enough yet. Twitter built (part of) their system using Scala.

There are people who think that Scala might be the next big language on the JVM, and even James Gosling (the inventor of Java) is very interested in it. But while I'm learning it, I sometimes wonder if some parts of it are too academic.

One of strong points of functional programming languages is that they are very well suited for concurrent programming (because of immutability, referential transparency (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Referential_transparency_(computer_science)) etc). Concurrency is going to be more and more important in high-performance computing with many-core processors. I can imagine that for such specialist applications Scala will be a good language. But I don't see it becoming a mainstream programming language for a while.

[conehead77]

I compiled my first Scala program last week so i cant say much about it but it seems like a good language to learn functional programming if you already know Java.
In my spare time i do some Haskell but it cant hurt to know a good jvm based language. Maybe i should look into Clojure as well but i know next to nothing about Lisp so its Scala for now.