The more I read of Martin Odersky's writing the more I appreciate his wisdom and understated intelligence.
I had the same initial reaction to Scala that a lot of people do but once you start actually using it you soon realize that it really is a fairly simple language built on a handful of orthogonal concepts. For example, if you look at the method list of any of the collection classes it may seem extremely daunting but you soon realize that all the collection classes expose the same common interface and that beyond that there's a very logical hierarchy of subtypes with either different or increased functionality. Scala makes it easy to layer abstractions like this and to incur only the complexity you need to solve the problem at hand.
As you gain experience you will find yourself using the type system in more sophisticated ways to make more guarantees of the behavior and correctness of your code but Martin's stated goal in designing Scala was to build a language that could scale with the user and the application domain and I think he's succeeded.
At the risk of getting downvoted like crazy, can somebody please explain to me the point of this blog post? It's just a couple of empty comparisons of Scala to lego/smartphones and C++/C#/Haskell to morse code.
I had the same initial reaction to Scala that a lot of people do but once you start actually using it you soon realize that it really is a fairly simple language built on a handful of orthogonal concepts. For example, if you look at the method list of any of the collection classes it may seem extremely daunting but you soon realize that all the collection classes expose the same common interface and that beyond that there's a very logical hierarchy of subtypes with either different or increased functionality. Scala makes it easy to layer abstractions like this and to incur only the complexity you need to solve the problem at hand.
As you gain experience you will find yourself using the type system in more sophisticated ways to make more guarantees of the behavior and correctness of your code but Martin's stated goal in designing Scala was to build a language that could scale with the user and the application domain and I think he's succeeded.