Thursday, March 06, 2008

Scala and F#

I have heard what Bruce Eckel, Ian Cooper, and David Pollak said about Scala and decided to give it a try. I downloaded Scala and bought a pre-print PDF edition of Programming in Scala.
It is cool! It is extremely interesting. Martin Odersky's book is aimed to beginners and is outstanding. The only thing which bothers me is lack of Scala IDE.

Since Scala is a functional language related to ML languages and running on Java VM, and F# is a functional language related to OCaml and running on .NET platform, I decided to try learning both languages simultaneously. I installed F# addition to Visual Studio.NET and bought Don Syme's book. As everything born in Microsoft, F# already has Visual Studio.NET IDE support. On the other hand, "Expert F#" is harder to read, and F#'s syntax looks more strange for OOP programmer than Scala's one.
But it's interesting too! What i simportant, C# also got some functional features, so that's all inter-related.