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.

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After being introduced to Scala and Lift at the SDForum panel on Emerging Languages I asked David Pollak, the lead and BDFL of the Lift web framework, if he would come to Spoke and tell us more about Lift and Scala, and he accepted. That was last Thursday and since I didn’t have any free time during working hours on Friday, I spent some time over the weekend leaning a little Scala and playing around with Lift. One of the first things that I wanted to do was to get Scala and a Lift project up and running on Eclipse. More…

SDForum2KeyThe SDForum Emerging Technology SIG had a very interesting panel on March 10, 2010 regarding emerging languages. The SIG organizers came up with the topic by posing the question, “if you’re going to put together a web app, what language would you use?” I thought that this panel was very informative, the questions were deep and mostly on topic, and the panelists were knowledgeable. The only problem was that the presentations were lightning fast so I could take notes fast enough butit only felt too fast from a note taking perspective. More…