As a programmer who cut his teeth on Assembler [various MT4,UR,HEAD versions] and Fortran, ye Editor is not fond of new programming languages. Having wondered how the Tower of Babel produced so many spoken languages, Babel must have been Ancient Academia where NIH-Not Invented Here ruled the roost and thus so many tongues proliferated. And so another computer language is treated as hateful Computer Language Proliferation and so is regarded on this blog as equivalent to the Plague, Insidiouses Debilitans.
With that preface, let me introduce Scala.
Go here to try Scala out yourself with live interpreted code.
Here is the essential good news about Scala:
1)It uses the JVM.
2)It is highly compatible with Java:
2a) – this means you can call any and all Java libraries from Scala,
2b) – this means you can call Scala routines from Java.
3)Scala is supported in Eclipse, Intellj, and NetBeans among other IDEs.
4)Scala with Netbeans GUI Builder is workable but …
5)Ye Editor became interested in Scala when Ceylon creator Gavin King trashed Scala vociferously.
6)Scala supports functions as values.
Given Simply Scala for getting up to speed very quickly, ample IDE support and tight connection with JVM and Java IDEs, ye Editor is more than “I-am-curious-Yellow” about Scala.