Over the last two days I have been giving Scala a quick whirl and I have to say out of all the new languages (functional and otherwise) I have been looking at recently only Erlang is anywhere near as exciting. There is a small fifteen page tutorial and after finishing it I immediately thought: “I want to see more of that”.

I can’t put my finger on it at the moment but I imagine its the fact that it seems perhaps more familiar due to the Java background. The functional syntax is as confusing as any other functional language.

P.S. if you go through the short 15 page tutorial then there is a slight blip in the tutorial when case classes are introduced. All the code for the calculator example should be wrapped in an object block if you want it to work. I.e.

object Calculator {
... tutorial code
}