From: Christian Szegedy <szegedy@...>
Date: 2004-01-21T09:50:00+09:00
Subject: Re: Proposal for programming language of the year

Volkmann, Mark wrote:
> I think one of the main points of learning a new language each year is that
> it should differ in some significant way from the languages you already
> know.  Having a syntax that resembles Ruby may disqualify Scala.

Ruby's syntax resembles that of C, Perl and Python. This did not 
disqualify Ruby. Familiar syntax is simply a courtesy of the language 
designer(s).

> 
> You could say the same about Groovy, however, for those looking for a
> language that borrows heavily from Ruby and interacts well with Java, I
> suggest looking at Groovy (http://groovy.codehaus.org).

I did not find Groovy particularly interesting, since it really seems to 
be yet another Ruby/Python-clone, written in/for Java.

On the other hand, Scala really does have a lot of distinguishing 
features known from functional languages: static typing with polymorphic 
types and methods, type inference, pattern matching and pi-calculus for 
concurrent programming.

Over mainstream functional languages, Scala features traits, type 
bounds, compound types, variance annotations, target typing, value 
classes, XML integration and a  great deal of reflexivity exceeding even 
that of Ruby. These are unprecedented and well motivated add-ons, 
significantly improving the programming efficiency.

For pragmatic reasons (like Groovy) Scala aims at perfect and seamless 
interaction with Java classes. This is not a feature on its own right, 
but it guarantees that Scala is apriori usable for practical programming 
  better than established functional languages which lack important 
support libraries.