Ever since the SDForum panel on emerging languages I’ve been very intrigued by the Scala programming language but have not been able to invest some time in a project to try it out. I got as far as setting up Eclipse with Scala and Lift but got no further. When I heard about the Engineer-to-Engineer Tech Talk, hosted at Redfin, about the use of Scala at Twitter, I made every effort to attend. The presentation was at Redfin on April 30, 2010 given by Alex Payne, who, at the time, was at Twitter and was one of the primary advocates of the introduction of Scala at Twitter. The talk really focused mostly on the good points of Scala and some of the reasons not to use Scala were possibly underplayed.