Lex Spoon
Dr. Alexander Spoon has been involved in the development of a wide variety of programming language research projects, ranging from dynamic languages like Scheme and Squeak to statically typed languages like Scala. He currently works on the compiler of the Google Web Toolkit, which converts Java code to JavaScript for running in web browsers. He previously worked two years as a post-doc at EPFL on Scala.
Java is ambitious in a few ways, but mostly it has been developed as one very practical decision after another. Scala rounds off the rough edges of Java by injecting it with many ideas from other languages, and it adds a few new features such as pattern matching that simplify your code further. I will describe the language and show a variety of ways it makes your code shorter and more to the point.
