Scala, the java of the future

The tug-o-war of software development languages gets really confusing; it’s hard to decide what language would prevail and become the new standard in application development. Why is it important? Because we are application developers, and our relevance in the business landscape is linked to the tools we are skilled in operating.

I have heard Professor Martin Odersky say that Scala is the java of the future. Although I cannot vogue for such a promise, I can certainly say that Scala is the most compelling language I have encountered.

Scala has incorporated many ideas, new and old from the other existing languages. Scala functional and object oriented. It has cool stuff like traits (aka mixins) and Actors (erlang style threads) and advanced pattern matching. Most of all, Scala is expressive and esthetic. Clean and comprehensible code means easy and efficient maintenance, and that is important.

Scala runs over the JVM. Hence Scala can call upon java functionality and vice versa. Scala also has a .net support but that is not my scope at this time. According to professor Odersky, the overall performance is not hampered and the results are usually as fast as Java. Michael Galpin posted some figures about Scala performance on his blog here and Nick Wiedenbrueck compared Scala, Java and Groovy here.

Following are some interesting links I found for getting into Scala top down:

Presentations:

• A nice introduction to pragmatic Scala development by Jonas Boner and the presentation slides
• Introduction to Lift by David Pollak
• A conversation on Scala and Groovy by Scott Davis, featuring Dr. Venkat Subramaniam:

Articles:

• First steps in Scala
• Scala by example (pdf):

Downloads:

• SDK
• IDE plugins