Scala at DJUG

Last week, I attended Denver Java User's Group (DJUG), and listened to Venkat Subramaniam give two talks dealing with Scala. I've been very interested in Lisp and/or functional programming since reading Paul Graham's piece on beating the averages, and then later, reading his book.

Shortly after that salvo of Graham's, it seemed like lots of languages cropped up (or at least started gaining attention - the list of languages that run on the JVM is HUGE) that also run on the JVM and provide at least some of the features that languages like Java does not, but that Lisp does (you'll have to read Paul Graham's essays and/or book to see what I mean). These are commonly called Java.next languages. Scala is one of those.

I've seen Venkat speak before, and it's always worth it, IMHO. He was sponsored by No Fluff Just Stuff, as is commonly done to help promote the conference and to help give to the community as well. I've been to at least three NFJS conferences now, and hope to go to this fall's (I was turned down by management last spring in my request to go then - in retrospect, that should have been a clue it may be time to move on).


Anyway, very good talks by Venkat. Side note: I don't want to neglect the fact that Tom Flaherty has given a few talks on Scala as well, but because of the power and the rather alien syntax and an entire new set of concepts, I find it useful to have it explained by different people and in different ways. And, since both talks were about Scala, it gave Venkat a chance to do a basic talk, then dive into how Scala's notion of actors (for multi-threading) works for the second talk - a feature that really makes Scala shine in today's multi-core world.

It will be very interesting to see what language becomes dominant on the JVM, if not Java itself. Scala, Groovy, Clojure, Ruby, etc...have really upped the bar, and I wonder how Sun, er, Oracle, will respond. Maybe they just keep very conservative with the language, and work on making really good JVMs? Maybe the language gets forked and the community takes it in a different direction?

Oh, and hey, I didn't win the drawing for a pass to NFJS, darn it, but I DID win a book. :) So many good ones to pick from, because my name was drawn early, but I ended up choosing the book on Lift (Scala framework).