I’ve started looking at Scala recently because it seems exactly the kind of language I would like to use as a complement to Java on the JVM: it’s similar to Java, but is a “pure” object oriented language and supports a shorter syntax, annotations, generics, closures, a functional programming style and mix-ins. Oh, and it’s fast, or at least seems to be from the little information that is available.

The fact that it’s statically typed is a huge plus in my eyes — I spent two and a half years as a PHP programmer before moving to Java, but think that dynamically typed languages are not for every task. Maybe I’m overgeneralizing, maybe.

Since Scala is rather new and doesn’t have many libraries yet, I’m sure there are plenty of exciting things that can and will be done in it, but I think there are a few areas where Scala should be especially useful. I’m talking about DSLs! Especially DSLs interacting with Java code (and preferably one way).

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