Attended an “Introduction to Scala for Java developers” talk at Skillsmatter. Presented by Miles Sabin, of Chuusai (the chaps who make the Scala IDE for Eclipse), the talk covered an overview of functional programming and the Scala language (traits, duck-typing, “everything is an object”, case classes…) . I managed to ask him about his thoughts on the growing comparisons between Scala and Clojure (as they both target the JVM). He seemed rather enthusiastic about the trend and praised the efforts of the Clojure team. Bottom line was - it’s up to the developer to choose according to personal taste, if you want a more LISP-oriented language then it’d be Clojure otherwise Scala. I’d have to vote Scala for now as it feels rather like Python…