Just finished course “Functional Programming Principles in Scala” by Martin Odersky on coursera. Scala looks very good, and Martin makes a good lectures about foundation and strategy of scala. Things such higher order function and pattern matching are very interesting. For me a minus that this course has a bit academic, and hasn’t connections to real problems and solutions, but it will be covered in next courses from Martin, which already announced.

For us, C# developers, many functional features already arrived in language, but some things in scala, like introducing fields from constructor or short form of returning looks like elegant and natural. Scala is not pure functional and build on top of Java, and this decision helps to fast grow language even in background there is no support from big corporations.

IDE based on eclipse and also useful, practical and fast enough. But documentation by feelings not so good as msdn, anyway, community is big – a lot of posts, examples and stack overflow answers.

As a resume, scala is a good choice to try new language and can be useful in production.