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Martin Odersky

SE Radio 62: Martin Odersky on Scala

Recording Venue:
Guest(s): Martin Odersky
Host(s): Markus
In this Episode we talk about the Scala language with its creator Martin Odersky. Scala is a language that fuses object oriented and functional programming. Martin started out by providing a two-minute overview over the language, and then talked a little bit about its history. We then discussed the basics of functional programming. The main part of the episode features a discussion of some of the important features of the Scala language:

  • Case Classes and Pattern Matching
  • Multiple Inheritance and Compound Types, Traits, Mixins
  • Closures
  • Functions as types, “Function pointers”, Anonymous functions
  • Higher Order Functions
  • Currying
  • (Sequence) Comprehensions
  • Generics
  • Type Bounds (Upper, Lower)
  • Static/Dynamic Typing, Type Inference
  • Operators
  • Implicits

We then talked about Scala’s actors library, a highly scalable concurrency package. The last part of the episode covered some more general topics, such as where and how Scala is used today, IDE support and the user and developer community. We concluded the episode by looking at current development and next steps in Scala language evolution.


Show Notes

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4 comments
  • Hi Marksu, Great episode!! Really good.

    Ok, now to currying:

    “AAAAhhhhhhhhhhhh”

    I can’t take it anymore…. all these imperative low level hackers everywhere! How are we supposed to get out of the enduring software crisis, if even in the year 2007 people still think that currying is some freaky complicated stuff that no one needs!?

    Currying helps everybody! It improves the readability of the code! It is also very very simple and intuitive.
    It also helps in maintaining a declarative way of writing code.

  • SER Team,
    All your podcasts related to functional programming have been extremely interesting. However, being a .NET Developer at the moment, I would like to hear more about F# (the .NET functional programming language) and where it’s going.
    Thanks again for your program and keep the great work!
    Gustavo

  • Hello Markus and Martin,

    Scala is an interesting alternative to Java.
    This podcast episode was produced two years ago. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to cover this topic again after so many developers are now enthusiastic about Scala. Does not need to be a basic kind of episode like this one. Rather a more in-depth coverage would do.

    As a side remark to Markus:
    a) Your website does not seem to work as expected. When clicking on “add a comment” directly in the eppisode shownotes page, I get an error. But it works when directly entering into the comments section.
    b) You got some spam comments though all of the security

    Again, thanks for this great and entertaining episode on Scala

    Anything planned on Clojure?

    best regards
    Richy

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