Thursday, January 01, 2009

Scala

My friend Mic and I have discussed a few languages I've been playing with over the past year or so, which include D and Erlang. I think I managed to persuade Mic that there is some benefit to Erlang, but maybe the jury's still out on D. Well a few weeks back Mic mentioned that he was looking at Scala, so I decided to take a look. I didn't find the time until I took a break from work for the festive season and have just spent a few days giving it a go. My first impressions are pretty positive (I've mentioned a few times in the past that I'm a fan of functional programming languages and particularly lisp which I've used for over 20 years). I'm trying to use it through Eclipse but am finding the plugin a bit clunky, so I may go back to the command-line and emacs (I'm a shell/emacs person at heart!)

So far I haven't got into any really complicated projects or applications so there may be problems with the language that I don't know about yet. But at the moment I like it and will persevere with some pet projects that I've been thinking about for a while. Even if it doesn't lead to anything ultimately, it's another language to learn and experience gained. But I have a suspicion it'll be more than a passing fad for me. Thanks Mic.

3 comments:

Michael Neale said...

Oh the eclipse plug in is pretty much in a write-off state - its probably worse to use it then use nothing !

So the options are emacs + command line (or maven/ant), or intelliJ (quite good support) or netbeans.

The other nice thing about scala is you can mix .java and .scala source files - eg if you have an existing app - and scalac will understand them.

Michael Neale said...

Oh just read that someone did some elisp to make emacs work nicely with scala projects (using maven to build and even get error line numbers etc).

See http://www.nabble.com/Emacs%2C-Scala-and-Maven%2C-Oh-My!-to21270359.html

Mark Little said...

Yeah, I gave up on Eclipse in favour of emacs.