One Language to Rule Them All

A discussion on LtU about the Next Big language, the next Java or something like it. Links to the post by Steve Yegge too. Once again Scala is mentioned as a fine language that anyone needing to develop for the JVM should try.

I don't believe Scala will be the next big language, but it really is fine. At the moment I'm finishing implementation of a simple distributed system written in Scala. It had to run on the JVM to communicate with other Java programs. It was a breeze to do, thanks to the Actors library. Scala's type system is quite interesting too, I plan on giving more attention to it when I have the time.

Scala web programming

A post on Lambda the Ultimate pointing to this post on David Pollak's blog. In a comment on the Lambda thread, he writes some points about what makes Scala a good language for web programming, comparing with Java and Ruby (with Rails). Having used all three, he gets to the conclusion that Scala has the best of the other two.

Scala

My choice for a functional programming language that integrates with .NET is F#. By the same token, when I think about writing software for the Java platform and wish to use a language better suited to my tastes, my choice is Scala. It's a pretty cool language that mixes OO and functional programming quite neatly, and with interesting theoretical studies to support it. The syntax was chosen to be similar to Java, which I don't like, but it's a minor problem. It's actively supported and developed, and is gaining momentum right now, which can be a good thing.

I need to write a simple program to talk to a Java program in the next few days, so I'll probably be using Scala for it. This means I may write posts about it in the near future.