What Scala?

[Bill Baxter]

On Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 11:38 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu
<SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:
> 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?

The information density is quite low.  I'm regretting having spent 15
minutes on it...  Spot checking the rest, it doesn't appear there's
much more there beyond what you could get from a 5-minute intro to
Scala on a web page somewhere.


> 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.

I think the code on top is also Scala, just written in a Java-esque style.

--bb