What Scala?

[Georg Wrede]

Bill Baxter wrote:
> 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.

Heh, forgot to mention, I wasn't thinking of you with this post. ;-)

One thing that looked nice was the use of var/val instead of final vs. 
the default. Short and neat, and easy to remember.

>> 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