juan_gandhi | yesterday's scala meeting

Right; we had yet another Bay Area Scala meeting at Linkedin last night. Martin Odersky came to answer questions; questions were posted, and, after pizza and beer, Martin and Josh were answering questions.

I do not thing I remember much, but here are two questions:

- How about improving enumerations in Scala? (

_navi_)
M.O.: Well, there's not much that can be done; you can always use reflection. I do not want to always create a new class for each enum instance, so...

- What do you think about Java 7 with the promised closure, will they undermine the current interest in Scala?
M.O.: Actually, it is too little too late. To properly use closures, you have to rework libraries, collections especially. Nothing like this can be expected any time soon. So Scala rules here. One positive thing is that now Scala solutions, that is, including closures, are not any more considered weird exotic: if "even Java" has closures, it is mainstream. The difference being that in Scala they are a part of culture.

- How did it happen you started a language?
M.O.: When, after working for some time on Java, I joined EPFL, I decided to take a step back (and it was 1999, Java was the king); and I valued a lot the thing that he could do the blue sky research. What we did was
purely fundamental/academic. We wrote a little language called funnel (built on joint calculus (concurrency), it was object-oriented. It was just bare-bones. Then we tried to use it, and it did not work in practice. It was a minimalistic language, it was boring to use. So I decided to do a richer language, make it as convenient as java. I first used it at an FP class at EPFL - told the students: "we use our own stuff: write a scala compiler!" So the whole class was working with an experimental language. The students were extremely forgiving. Then the language gradually settled down.

There was a question regarding alternatives to Scala Swing; John said the best alternative is Scala Swing, so there.

And there was socializing; so my question was answered (will write on it in the other post here).