Erlang User Group - Scala #

What: Scala Presentation by Stefan Plantikow.
Where: Cockpit of the Box119 http://boxhagener119.de/ (Ring at UPSTREAM)
When: Wednesday, 11.03.2009, 8:00 p.m.

Yesterday the Erlounge, organised by Jan Lehnardt, took place in the Cockpit of Box119 in Berlin. Topic of the evening was an introduction to Scala.

Scala is a functional language that compiles to Java Bytecode and runs on the JVM. It tries to combine the best from two worlds: Object oriented languages and functional programming. So every function is an object and every object is a function.

Some interesting bits of information:

• Scala is a statically typed language - but you can omit the types most of the times as type inference in the compiler is pretty good.
  
• Everything is an object - there is no difference in primitives and objects.
  
• There are packages for distributed computing - spawning processes and sending messages is not as fast as in Erlang there is still room for improvement.
  
• The developers are currently about to tidy up the syntax and take care of corner cases.
  
• It is easy to start with Scala as you can start out with a subset of the language and extend your knowledge as you need.
  
• Scala means Scalable language. Scalable in terms of projects and tasks you can accomplish with it.