Perhaps a brief Googling of Scala didn’t leave behind the correct impression. Kanwa worries about losing types in Scala. Nothing could be further from the truth! In fact, my personal impression of Scala is that it is a programming language built around an obsession with types.

Scala is one of those languages where “everything is an object,” including numeric constants, and they all have a type. There are cases where Scala will guess a type for you from context (this is called “inference”) but except in this case, everything is and needs to be very solidly typed.

Martin Odersky, the main author of Scala, is the same person who built the generics extensions for Java 1.5 (or so). Yes, his very code is in the Java runtime! Generics in Java is a bit half-assed for compatibility reasons; in Scala, he was able to pull all the stops, so Scala handles generic types very pedantically. In working with Scala, you will see messages about type related errors that other languages wouldn’t even have known to detect! But on the upside, you do get some of that pleasant effect of (explicitly) statically typed languages: Once you get your program past the compiler, it’s forced you to think hard enough about the code that chances are it’s free of logic errors as well.

As for FOTY: Blech! Everybody and their dog are building new, improved mousetraps every week. Having absorbed a handful of them, I’m starting to feel diminishing returns from chasing after ever newer ones. There comes a time when meta-meta-meta-programming is not more concise than actually coding what you mean.

”
Stick to Java as you will face problems related to data type.

Eg: Can you tell me what types are passed here in the function argument

public void runMyFunc(dob, favy)
{

}
”

While your argument is one that I would agree with (loss of legibility due to lack of types) Scala does not suffer from this problem – your example would have to look something like the following:

def runMyFunc(dob: Date, favy: Int) {}

Looks pretty statically typed to me!

Later you make this comment:

”
What is this type-safe way they mentioned? you know better
”

Exactly *what* are you talking about? Do you have a different definition of type safety than everybody else? Perhaps it would interest you to know that Scala is *more* strict about types than is Java.

Next time use The Google. It is your friend.

ruby reignited my programming fire – clojure have added another boost

Sorry if I sounded wrong. I did not mean to say that Scala is a scripting language.
I just meant that don’t learn scala (or) scripting languages.

For the quote you mentioned “Scala is a static typed language” part, I beg to differ
as I found this in the home page of scala under Introduction:

“Scala is a general purpose programming language designed to express common
programming patterns in a concise, elegant, and type-safe way.”

What is this type-safe way they mentioned? you know better

Thanks
Kanwa

Stick to Java as you will face problems related to data type.

Eg: Can you tell me what types are passed here in the function argument

public void runMyFunc(dob, favy)
{

}

If long code(> 500 lines) like the above one is written, we never will understand
what’s happening in the code and worst if you check your code after say two
months, you will weep to understand the code because you don’t know what is
dob or favy is.

You will break your head on try to figure out what “dob” is –
an object or int or what?

Your LOTY shud be FOTY (F- Framework of the year)

Cheers,
Kanwa

I stumbled across a fantastic online book “Practical Common Lisp” http://gigamonkeys.com/book. It shows real-world samples of using Lisp, including writing a unit test framework in less than 50 lines of code, along with an MP3 database and HTML generation library. At least the introduction chapter. It hooked me.

Now for the kicker, another guy wrote a corresponding blog, showing the equivalent solutions in Clojure! http://blog.thinkrelevance.com/2008/9/16/pcl-clojure.