On Tuesday, September 23rd Dianne Marsh from SRT Solutions gave a presentation at the Ann Arbor JUG on the programming language Scala. Dianne is a very active member of the development community; a 'geek celebrity' of sorts. If you listen to the JavaPosse you'll often hear her speaking in the Round Table podcasts from the Java Posse Roundup. She is also one of the primary coordinators for CodeMash. I attended CodeMash last year and found the quality of the conference pretty amazing; particularly given the low price point ($125). These sorts of conferences are what software development should be about; sharing ideas and information and making it accessible to all developers.
 
Dianne's Scala presentation approached Scala from a Java developer's perspective and highlighted some of the basic differences between Scala and Java. Scala is a 'hybrid' object oriented/functional programming language that runs on the JVM. Dianne's presentation approached the Scala language from a Java developer's point-of-view by showing code written in Java and then in Scala. This compare/contrast format demonstrated just how concise and elegant the syntax of the Scala language is in comparison to the at-times clunkiness of Java.
 
She discusses her presentation in her blog that includes the slides from her presentation:
http://srtsolutions.com/blogs/diannemarsh/archive/2008/09/24/scala-for-java-programmers-talk.aspx