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Episode 62: Martin Odersky on Scala
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In this Episode we talk about the Scala language with its creator Martin Odersky. Scala is a language that fuses object oriented and functional programming. Martin started out by providing a two-minute overview over the language, and then talked a little bit about its history. We then discussed the basics of functional programming. The main part of the episode features a discussion of some of the important features of the Scala language:
We then talked about Scala's actors library, a highly scalable concurrency package. The last part of the episode covered some more general topics, such as where and how Scala is used today, IDE support and the user and developer community. We concluded the episode by looking at current development and next steps in Scala language evolution. |
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Comments
Currying
Hi Marksu, Great episode!! Really good.
Ok, now to currying:
"AAAAhhhhhhhhhhhh"
I can't take it anymore.... all these imperative low level hackers everywhere! How are we supposed to get out of the enduring software crisis, if even in the year 2007 people still think that currying is some freaky complicated stuff that no one needs!?
Currying helps everybody! It improves the readability of the code! It is also very very simple and intuitive.
It also helps in maintaining a declarative way of writing code.
Request for F# Podcast
SER Team,
All your podcasts related to functional programming have been extremely interesting. However, being a .NET Developer at the moment, I would like to hear more about F# (the .NET functional programming language) and where it's going.
Thanks again for your program and keep the great work!
Gustavo
Do it again!
Hello Markus and Martin,
Scala is an interesting alternative to Java.
This podcast episode was produced two years ago. Wouldn't it be a good idea to cover this topic again after so many developers are now enthusiastic about Scala. Does not need to be a basic kind of episode like this one. Rather a more in-depth coverage would do.
As a side remark to Markus:
a) Your website does not seem to work as expected. When clicking on "add a comment" directly in the eppisode shownotes page, I get an error. But it works when directly entering into the comments section.
b) You got some spam comments though all of the security
Again, thanks for this great and entertaining episode on Scala
Anything planned on Clojure?
best regards
Richy
A Twitter developer has said
A Twitter developer has said that Scala could become the language of choice of the modern Web 2.0 startup. LinkedIn also uses the language. So do with many other big corporate names including Sony Pictures, EDF and SAP. Martin Odersky tells us about Scala’s history, its future and what makes it so interesting.
Why did you call the language Scala?
It means scalable language in the sense that you can start very small but take it a long way. For newcomers, it looks a bit like a scripting language. For the last two years we have actually been invited to compete in the JavaOne ScriptBowl, a Java scripting language competition insurance. But Scala is not really a scripting language — that's not it's main characteristic. In fact, it can express everything that Java can and I believe there are a lot of things it can offer for large systems that go beyond the capabilities of Java. One of the design criteria was that we wanted to create a language that can be useful for everything from very small programs right up to huge systems and without the need to change structure along the way.
What led you to develop Scala?
In the 90s I became involved in the development of the Java language and its compiler. I got together with another researcher, Philip Wadler, and we developed Pizza that eventually led to Generic Java (GJ), and then to Java version 5. Along the way I got to write the javac compiler. The compiler for GJ, which was our extension, was adopted as a standard long before Sun decided to adopt the GJ language constructs into Java — they took the compiler first.