Jamis Buck wrote:

> Wow, that was my experience in a nutshell, too.  I've tried several 
> times to learn Haskell (and OCaml, BTW), but always fail to see how it 
> could actually be useful/"fun".  Also, the syntax seems obfuscated to 
> me, but that's probably just because I've had little experience with 
> functional languages (a little Scheme in college, is all).

I thought, all of you can already Haskell, since it was sometimes the
LOtY :)

I have to say, I really love Haskell. It has the most elegant syntax of
all programming languages known by me (including that of Ruby or Scala).
But its practical performance and user-friendliness make me use ocaml
if I need to minimize runtime and Ruby if I need to write something
quickly.

I think Scala has a lot of nice features which will make it
the ideal GUI programming language. It combines functionality and
object-orientedness in a much more seamless way than any other
programming languages so far. E.g. in Scala everything is object like
in Ruby, but it gives full support for functional programming.
It supports open variants, but they are embedded in the object-hierarchy
in a very consistent way i haven't seen so far anywhere.

Moreover type-bounds and variant-annotations seem to be essential when
one starts to mix functional style with object oriented programming in
a type-safe fashion. This feature was also completely unknown to me
before reading about them in the Scala docus.

So, it seems to me that Scala is a more advanced language than Ruby,
Ocaml or Haskell, using almost all useful features of them while
enhancing them significantly at the same time.