By Ed Burnette, ZDNet
“Programming languages are like screwdrivers for developers. One size does not fit all, so good programmers keep several in their tool belt. The problem is, new languages are coming out all the time and you’ve only got so much room on your belt and in your schedule to learn them. In today’s guest column, language guru David Biesack makes the case for Scala, a new language that takes the best ideas from object oriented and functional programming languages. As a member of the JSR 201 committee, David helped design new syntax features in Java 5. He was also a reviewer for the Java Language Specification (3rd edition), Java in a Nutshell, and Programming in Scala. –Ed
Java has matured nicely in the last dozen years. That merely means Java developers all familiar with its shortcomings, like the verbosity of generic type declarations, interfaces that cannot define default method implementations, its lack of closures, etc. Backward compatibility keeps it from evolving radically, and other dynamic/scripting languages like Ruby, Groovy, Python are drawing a large following because of their ease of use and flexible capabilities. In this environment, (www.scala-lang.org) Martin Ordersky created Scala as a language which does for Java what many Java did for C: advance the older language (with great features of other languages) while stripping it of its cruftier bits. However, just as Java was not C, Scala is not Java with new features. An entirely new OO language that runs on the JVM and integrates smoothly with Java 5.”
