"I have a mind like a steel... uh... thingy." Patrick Logan's weblog.

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Wednesday, January 02, 2008

Scalagain

Respectable people (1, 2) are still looking at the Scala programming language for the JVM. I took a reasonably deep dive on it back in the summer. As I wrote back then, I've tinkered back in the day with SML, Haskell (and a bit of other functional languages like Clean). But being significantly deeper into "dynamic" languages like Lisp, Smalltalk, and now somewhat Python and Ruby, I never really got over the curve of "thinking in types".

There is a difference between "type-driven programming" and "test-driven" (or in Lisp, repl-driven, or in Smalltalk, workspace-driven). I'm not sure what "type-driven" feels like in real settings. And so after a week of kicking Scala's tires off and on, I decided it's nice but not enough in my wheelhouse to get excited about.

Reading folks blogging about their own Scaladventures and reading that a new book (400+ pages!! That could be good or bad) is available (currently as a draft), I purchased the book and will tinker again, at least for a few more days, with Scala.

I just got my access key to Amazon's Simple DB, so maybe I'll dream up something interesting there with Scala. Integrating the dynamic, semi-structured nature of systems like Simple DB with the compile-time rich type checking of a language like Scala is an ongoing area of, em, interest. Dynamic languages never get in my way with things like Simple DB.

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About Me

Portland, Oregon, United States
I'm usually writing from my favorite location on the planet, the pacific northwest of the u.s. I write for myself only and unless otherwise specified my posts here should not be taken as representing an official position of my employer. Contact me at my gee mail account, username patrickdlogan.