An interview about Scala

[bearophile]

"A Conversation with Steve Jenson, Alex Payne, and Robey Pointer" by Bill Venners, April 3, 2009, about the Scala language:
http://www.artima.com/scalazine/articles/twitter_on_scala.html

Scala is one of the few modern languages (like C#, F#, Clojure) that deserve to be followed by D designers.

Few quotes from that interview:

> Bill Venners: If I’m thinking about using Scala in a production system, what should I worry about? [...]

Steve Jenson: Making sure that you're using mutability in the right places. Start with immutability, then use mutability where you find appropriate. That's been a good lesson for us. The reason you should care about immutability is that if you're using threads and your objects are immutable, you don't have to worry about things changing underneath you. For us that's been a big win. We really only ever go to mutability if we feel we need an extra performance gain.

Robey Pointer: And the JIT compiler can apparently give some important performance benefits to immutable objects.<


>Alex Payne: I think programmers who've never worked with a language with pattern matching before should be prepared to have that change their perceptions about programming. I was talking to a group of mostly Mac programmers, largely Objective-C developers. I was trying to convey to them that once you start working with pattern matching, you'll never want to use a language without it again. It's such a common thing that a programmer does every day. I have a collection of stuff. Let me pick certain needles out of this haystack, whether its based on a class or their contents, it's such a powerful tool. It's so great.<

Bye,
bearophile