Software Engineering Radio is a podcast targeted at the professional software developer. The goal is to be a lasting educational resource, not a newscast. SE Radio covers all topics software engineering. Episodes are either tutorials on a specific topic, or an interview with a well-known character from the software engineering world. All SE Radio episodes are original content — we do not record conferences or talks given in other venues. Each episode comprises two speakers to ensure a lively listening experience. SE Radio is brought to you by the IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.

Episode 62: Martin Odersky on Scala

July 15, 2007 53:57 51.8 MB Downloads: 0
In this Episode we talk about the Scala language with its creator Martin Odersky. Scala is a language that fuses object oriented and functional programming. Martin started out by providing a two-minute overview over the language, and then talked a little bit about its history. We then discussed the basics of functional programming. The main part of the episode features a discussion of some of the important features of the Scala language:
  • Case Classes and Pattern Matching
  • Multiple Inheritance and Compound Types, Traits, Mixins
  • Closures
  • Functions as types, "Function pointers", Anonymous functions
  • Higher Order Functions
  • Currying
  • (Sequence) Comprehensions
  • Generics
  • Type Bounds (Upper, Lower)
  • Static/Dynamic Typing, Type Inference
  • Operators
  • Implicits
We then talked about Scala's actors library, a highly scalable concurrency package. The last part of the episode covered some more general topics, such as where and how Scala is used today, IDE support and the user and developer community. We concluded the episode by looking at current development and next steps in Scala language evolution.