Inkslinger77 notes a Computerworld talk with Martin Odersky on the Scala language, which is getting a lot of attentiveness from its use on esteemed sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn. The strongly typed verbalization is intended to be a usable melding of functional and object-oriented programming techniques. "My one of the folks and I spend a lot of time writing code so we wanted to have object that was a joy to program in. That was a very definite goal. We wanted to remove as many of the incantations of fixed high-protocol languages as probable and give Scala great expressiveness so that developers can model things in the ways they want to. ... You can express Scala programs in several ways. You can make them look very much like Java programs which is nice for programmers who start out coming from Java. ... But you can also express Scala programs in a purely functional way and those programs can end up looking quite unlike from typical Java programs. Often they are much more concise. ... Twitter has been able to sustain rare growth, and it seems with more stability than what they had before the switch, so I think that's a good testament to Scala. ... e are looking at new ways to program multicore processors and other parallel systems. We already have a head start here because Scala has a popular actor system which gives you a high-level way to express concurrency. ... The interesting thing is that actors in Scala are not a parlance feature, they have been done purely as a Scala library. So they are a good witness to Scala's flexibility..."

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