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With the GA release of Scala 2.8 getting very close, David Pollak, the creator of the Scala-based web framework: Lift, has announced a Scala community initiative that  will have an equally large impact on Scala developers.  The Fresh Scala Initiative aims to address the issue of version fragility in the ecosystem.  You may have heard that Scala 2.8 is not binary compatible with the 2.7 branch.  Therefore, some community members have banded together to maintain a repository and provide nightly builds of popular Scala library collections to build against Scala 2.8.  

The past couple of years have seen some extended debates on whether Scala is a functional language. On the one hand, Scala offers essentially all programming constructs typically associated with functional programming and a lot of Scala code is purely functional. On the other hand quite a few people disagree that Scala is a functional language. For instance, Robert Fischer writes that Scala is Not a Functional Programming Language and Daniel Spiewak summarizes some of the arguments asking Is Scala Not Functional Enough?

In order to test and run benchmarks on the work I'm doing around creating a managed variant of the JSR-166y ForkJoinPool along with supporting infrastructure for use with Scala Actors, I'm creating a test harness that captures a host of environmental factors about how it was run, and writing sbt actions to make it easy to run the benchmarks and automatically permute the variables.

scala> val ONE_DAY = 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000 ONE_DAY: Int = 86400000 scala> var manyDays: Long = ONE_DAY * 10000 manyDays: Long = 711573504 scala> var manyDays: Long = ONE_DAY * 10000L manyDays: Long = 864000000000 scala> ONE_DAY * 10000 res1: Int = 711573504

ScalaModules is an open source project aimed at providing fluent support for OSGi to Scala developers. It takes advantage of Scala's infix operator notation, higher order functions, and implicit conversions. ScalaModules transparently uses the Scala compiler to wrap an OSGi BundleContext with its own RichBundleContext model. This general technique is not unusual for creating DSLs in mainstream languages. Sean McDirmid uses similar tricks for his C# Bling library for WPF, except that Bling must overcome the lack of C# offering comparable extensions to Scala.

First, right off the top here: Scala has true blue Java-like null; any reference may be null. Its presence muddies the water quite a bit. But since Beust's article explicitly talks about Haskell he's clearly not talking about that aspect of Scala because Haskell doesn't have null. I'll get back to Scala's null at the end but for now pretend it doesn't exist.Second, just to set the record straight: "Option" has roots in programming languages as far back as ML. Both Haskell's "Maybe" and Scala's "Option" (and F#'s "Option" and others) trace their ancestry to it.

Scala is a general purpose programming language principally targeting the Java Virtual Machine. Designed to express common programming patterns in a concise, elegant, and type-safe way, it fuses both imperative and functional programming styles. Its key features are: statically typed; advanced type-system with type inference; function types; pattern-matching; implicit parameters and conversions; operator overloading; full interop with Java

cala is a general purpose programming language principally targeting the Java Virtual Machine. Designed to express common programming patterns in a concise, elegant, and type-safe way, it fuses both imperative and functional programming styles. Its key features are: statically typed; advanced type-system with type inference; function types; pattern-matching; implicit parameters and conversions; operator overloading; full interop with Java

Dave Megginson (who drove the development of the SAX API that will be familiar to many XML developers who use Java) recently wrote Java is dead. Java stood out as a programming language (though not as a platform) in that Sun had refused to standardize it through an independent and reputable standards organization (a lot of the hard work had been done in one attempt to put it through ECMA and one to put it through ISO, both times Sun pulled out and eventually made their highly unsatisfactory JCP Java Community Process system.) Without the ability to alter Java significantly in ways that might go against their druthers, Java suffered two major forks (Microsoft's J++ then its C#, and IBM's SWT) where significant players disagreed with a major component (the graphics library). Java succeeded in middleware, and but failed to take advantage of the rise of browsers on the deskop: their HTML parser was great for the middle 1990s but was deliberately neglected to the point of being unusable: it is hard not to see this as a deliberate attempt by Sun to leave the browser market to its friends and enemies. I really liked Java, and bet my company on it (in a sense): I would not do that today.

In this interview made by InfoQ’s Sadek Drobi, Don Syme, a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research, answers questions mostly on F#, but also on functional programming, C# generics, type classes in Haskell, similarities between F# and Scala.