Playing With Scala

Recently I've started playing with Scala, a mixed OO/functional language for the JVM. It's biggest selling point is that it looks and feels a lot like a dynamic (ie scripting) language, but it's statically typed and therefore about as fast as Java code.

My biggest issue has been that a lot of the documentation about it has a very academic feel. One doc I read jumped almost straight into "Actors" (a rather advanced topic, especially for people who have never used Erlang) instead of introducing you to the language. I've been hearing that 2008 is the year Scala will take off - but I think that will only happen if there is "documentation for the rest of us".

Fortunately, that does appear to be coming. I broke down and bought the preprint of Programming in Scala, which goes some way towards decent documentation (though some of the examples do stray into academic territory). Even though it's still in an early form, I highly recommend it to anyone who might be interested in looking into Scala and who doesn't want to feel that they're back on a Computer Science course. My first look at Scala was a couple months back and the lack of decent docs put me off, I thought I'd give it another shot now that this book is out and I haven't dropped Scala yet.