Scala -- progressing nicely
A little over two weeks ago,
I was wondering about the status of the Scala
programming language. I posted
a question about it on the Lambda weblog.
I had been looking at
Martin Odersky's personal site and seen it unchanged since January.
Well, I sent him email and it turns out that there is a more
official Scala page,
that the language is in use in teaching at LAMP
(Laboratoire des Méthodes de Programmation,
at EPFL (Lausanne, Switzerland)), and that there is
a Scala distribution.
The compiler isn't quite stable yet, and as I mentioned yesterday,
it does require Java 1.4 which puts me out in the cold for now, since
I run Mac OS X at home.
I won't have a complete review of the language for a while yet,
though I did finally read all three of the papers about it, and some
of the examples in the distribution. Some of its features are
java-inspired and not quite to my tastes, but overall it's one of the
better-looking language designs I've seen in a long time.
Vaguely like OCaml with sane syntax, or like a Python that has been
made just enough less dynamic to permit a truly optimizing compiler
to exist. (Someday.)
1:25:34 AM
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