11 Oct 2010

Scala Lift Off London was Wonderful.

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I just spent two days at the Scala Lift Off unconference, meeting and chatting with 100+ old and new friends, hearing what everyone is interested in or learning about or doing. Plus the luminaries of the field were there to join in, answer questions, discuss what can be changed and how.  Think about that for a second: it's pretty much the best possible world, and it's really your fault if you can't get something good out of that :-)

I'm not going to give an account of the sessions.  I'm sure others will do a good job of that, and also there's the unconference wiki, photos tagged with scalaliftoffoct78, tweets tagged with #scalalol and videos on the Skillsmatter Vimeo site.    A few small factoids I picked up...

  • Happy to see many hands go up in answer to the "who has Scala in production?" question. 
  • Scala Solutions are adding their effort to the Scala IDE: making Eclipse+Scala better is seen as a good way to help Java developers over to Scala. 
  • Parallel collections to ship in Jan 2011.  Making use of those multicores.
  • I should look at Vector and HashMap and not just List, as they are efficient and persistent in 2.8
  • sbt and lifty give a very nice way to start and build Lift projects.
  • There was lots of interest in Akka.  I didn't hit any of those sessions, but this Wednesday the London Scala User Group is hosting "Simpler Scalability, Fault-tolerance, concurrency and remoting through Actors" at 6:30pm.
  • There's going to be a Lift training course in London.

For me the most impressive session was the one where all the scary functional words were listed on a white board ("applicative functor", "monads"...)  and then the group tried to define them and give examples. 

If any of this sounds appealing, keep an eye on the Skillsmatter Scala page, because there's plenty happening you might like.   

See you at Scala Liftoff London 2011 (Oct 6 and 7, registration now open).