On Scala (or: Static Typing Doesn't Have To Suck)

In this paper Scala is discussed as an alternative to increasingly popular, dynamically typed JVM languages such as JRuby and Groovy. There are developers who are rightly concerned about the move to dynamically typed languages for their enterprise projects. With impressive support for both object-oriented and functional paradigms, Scala provides many of the expressive benefits of a dynamically typed language with the reassurance and safety of a traditional static type system. In this paper, we will compare Java with Scala and, in turn, Scala with Ruby to demonstrate that static typing is not itself a constraint on nor an indicator of the expressive capabilities of a programming language.