Brighton Scala User Group Meetup December 17, 2008

Pub meet up for those with an interest in the Scala programming language (http://www.scala-lang.org/). Come along, say hello and have a chat and a pint.

If the pub is busy, head round to the right and to the back: there's a kid of hidden alley of seats where we can usually find a table.

You'll be able to find us because we'll have a copy of "Programming in Scala" on the table.

Topics from the last meeting included: The Scala Plugin for Eclipse, how it runs on the Mac, how it lives with Maven; The power of AOP for fixing other people's code; NIO; The JVM language summit, and photos taken; Neil Gafter, Closures In Java, what we think NG thinks of Scala; Refinements, a.k.a. duck typing; Invoke dynamic, tail recursion, catching multiple exceptions; Java 7, do we care about Java language features now? We do care about the JVM; Languages on the JVM with parity performance to Java: Scala, Clojure; Idioms; Mac keyboards as a way for Apple to lock-in users; What Scala language features Java developers like; Using existing web frameworks other than Lift with Scala; Focal length, depth of field; Sun's war chest; The Groovy/Grails/Spring Source deal; Return early v. one and only one return; Language features for nicely dealing with instanceOf tests; Interesting corner-cases of the type system; What *is* it about Scala that's so attractive? What problem is Scala solving?