Last night was the Brighton Scala User Group pub meet up (Wayback link to meet up). For the record the conversation covered:
- The Scala Plugin for Eclipse, how it runs on the Mac, how it lives with Maven.
- The power of Aspect Orientated Programming for fixing other people’s code.
- NIO.
- The JVM language summit.
- Neil Gafter, Closures In Java, what we think NG thinks of Scala.
- Refinements, a.k.a. duck typing (see section 3.2.7 and specifically example 3.2.4 on page 22 of the Language Spec).
- Invoke dynamic, tail recursion, catching multiple exceptions.
- Is there a JSR for Java 7?
- Java 7, do we care about Java language features now? We do care about the JVM.
- Languages on the JVM with parity performance with Java: Scala, Clojure.
- Idioms.
- Mac keyboards as a way for Apple to lock in users.
- What Scala language features Java developers like.
- Using existing web frameworks other than Lift with Scala.
- Focal length, depth of field.
- Sun’s war chest.
- The Groovy/Grails/Spring Source deal.
- Return early v. one and only one return.
- Language features for nicely dealing with instanceOf tests.
- Interesting corner-cases of the type system.
- What is it about Scala that’s so attractive? What problems is Scala solving?
The next event (Wayback link to next event) will be 17 December 2008.
UPDATE: This became Functional Brighton
