Impression on Scala

I have been hearing quite a lot of good comments about the Scala programming language. I personally use Java extensively in the past and have switched to Ruby (and some Erlang) in last 2 years. The following features that I heard about Scala really attracts me ...

• Scala code is compiled in Java byte code and run natively in JVMs. Code written in Scala immediately enjoy the performance and robustness of Java VM technologies.
• Easy to integrate with Java code and libraries, immediately enjoy the wide portfolio of exiting Java libraries.
• It has good support to the Actor model, which I believe is an important programming paradigm for multi-core machine architecture.

So I decide to take a Scala tutorial from Dean Wampler today in the Qcon conference. This is a summary of my impression on Scala after the class.

First of all, Scala is a strongly typed language. However it has a type inference mechanism so you don't have to type declaration is optional. But in some place (like a method signature), type declaration is mandatory. It is not very clear to me when I have to declare a type.

Having the "val" and "var" declaration in variables is very nice because it makes immutability explicit. In Ruby, you can make an object immutable by sending it a freeze() method but Scala do this more explicitly.

But I found it confusing to have a method define in 2 different ways

class A() {
   def hello {
       ...
   }
}

class A() {
   def hello = {
       ...
   }
}

The MyFunction[+A1, -A2] is really confusing to me. I feel the typeless language is much more easy.

Removing the open and close bracket is also causing a lot of confusion to me.

class Person(givenName: String) {
   var myName = givenName
   def name =(anotherName: String) = {
       myName = anotherName
   }
}

class Person(givenName: String) {
   var myName = givenName
   def name =(anotherName: String) = myName = anotherName
}

The special "implicit" conversion method provides a mechanism to develop DSL (Domain Specific Language) in Scala but it also looks very odd to me. Basically, you need to import a SINGLE implicit conversion method that needs to take care of all possible conversions.

All the method that ends with ":" has a reverse calling order is also an odd stuff to me.

Traits provides mixins for Scala but I feel the "Module" mechanism in Ruby has done a better job.

Scala has the notion of "function" and can pass "function" as parameters. Again, I feel Ruby blocks has done a better job.

Perhaps due to JVM's limitation of supporting a dynamic language, Scala is not very strong in doing meta-programming, Scala doesn't provide the "open class" property where you can modify an existing class (add methods, change method implementation, add class ... etc.) at run time

Scala also emulate a number of Erlang features but I don't feel it is doing a very clean job. For example, it emulate the pattern matching style of Erlang programming using the case Class and unapply() method but it seems a little bit odd to me.

Erlang has 2 cool features which I couldn't find in Scala (maybe I am expecting too much)

• The ability to run two version of class at the same time
• Able to create and pass function objects to a remote process (kinda like a remote code loading)

Overall impression

I have to admit that my impression on Scala is not as good as before I attend the tutorial. Scala tries to put different useful programming paradigm in the JVM but I have a feeling of force-fit. Of course its close tie to JVM is still a good reason to use Scala. But from a pure programming perspective, I will prefer to use a combination of Ruby and Erlang, rather than Scala.