Why Scala? How a serial language enthusiast settled down with a nice Swiss language.

1. This talk is about
how a serial language enthusiast
settled down with a nice Swiss language
called
Scala.

2. Hi, I’m al3x, and I’m
an addict
a serial language enthusiast.
Came to previous C4s for Io, Erlang. Have programmed for money in Java, JavaScript, C, PHP,
Perl, Ruby, and Python. Have programmed for fun, love, or spite in x86 Assembly, Erlang,
Lua, Objective-C, various Lisps, Haskell, O-Caml, C++, Io, Erlang.

3. I work at Twitter.
Twitter has used mostly Ruby.
Ruby is good for some things.
But not everything.
Ruby’s poor VM performance, monkeypatching and cultural issues, questionable for large
systems. We had new services to build, didn’t want to continue with Ruby.

4. I wanted:
fast
functional
expressive
statically typed
concurrent
beautiful
a pony
My personal criteria for a good systems language.