What Scala?

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

Georg Wrede wrote:
> There's been a lot of talk about Scala when various new aspects of D 
> have been discussed. I stumbled upon a video where exactly those things 
> are talked about.
> 
> http://blog.jaoo.dk/2009/03/09/an-introduction-to-the-scala-programming-language-by-bill-venners/ 
> 
> 
> "Bill Venners, co-author of the Scala book, gave a nice introduction to 
> the Scala programming Language at JAOO last year. "
> 
> Actually, he gives a nice introduction to the concepts /we/ have been 
> discussing. And no other crap. :-)

Bill is a nice guy (I met him), but I don't quite like this talk. Gosh,
he spends like *forever* on the if statement... at some point he asks
people whether they've seen the ?: operator... does JAOO stand for
Conference of Brain Damage Survivors?

And if I see the O(n)-space factorial example once more, I'm going to
throw my shoes at the speaker. Use a loop and get a life.

Also, is that a bug in the Java code at 12:17? I'm seeing a statement line:

BigInt.ONE;

that I think is just an object, so the statement has no effect. Right? 
If so, well, that's quite bad.


Andrei