Exploring Scala

I’ve started experimenting with the programming language Scala. I’ve been wanting to get back into functional programming for some time, but I’ve found it impractical for the time being to dive right into something like ML, Haskell or Scheme. Scala has gained notoriety since Twitter announced that they’ve rewritten their engine in it. Some of its benefits are:

  • Mixes multiple paradigms, including imperative, functional and actor programming
  • Runs on the Java VM – interop with Java libraries and frameworks is trivial
  • Lightweight syntax

There is much to like in this. I’m hoping that it will turn out to be useful as a rapid prototyping language for trying things out, especially since so many third party tools are available in Java world.

For now I am using exercises from Project Euler as a means to experiment with and learn it. This works surprisingly well.

Also see this list of the most popular programming languages – Scala is now number 27, ahead of Prolog, Erlang, Haskell and ML.

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  1. From Monomorphic — First steps with Scala: XML pull parsing on 14 Aug 2009 at 2:39 pm

    […] to share some of the results of my recent experiments with the Scala programming language. In May I wrote that I had started looking at it. I’ve been using it to make some support tools that I needed […]

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