Why Scala

I wanted to write a post 'Why Scala is such a nice/great language', but after I've seen the Martin Odersky presentations at google, and at FOSDEM 2009, Bonas Joner at QCon 2009 'Pragmatic Real-World Scala)', Evan Weaver with 'Improving Running Components at Twitter' and the James Strachan's (of groovy fame) post, an impressive collection of learning Scala resources, I had the impression that there is nothing more to be said (that hasn't be said before).

There is even an online and offline ScalaTour.

Nevertheless, we could/should mention

Java-Basics:

* seamless java integration
* IDE support, build support (maven, ant, sbt, buildr)
* java code coverage

OO-Basics:
* objects all-way-down (see ScalaOverview) (the Smalltalk way)
** primitives are efficiently wrapped & handled by the compiler
* closures/functions are objects too
* multiple trait inheritance (e.g. utility-belt, logging, ...)

Fun-Stuff:
* extensible pattern matching (i.e. switch on steroids on objects)
* functional idioms allowed
* type inference (Hindley-Milner)
* reified generics
* type classes
* elegant solution to the Expression Problem