Episode 62: Martin Odersky on Scala

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.