Paul O’Rorke

David Pollak and Jorge Ortiz provided a full day hands-on workshop on Lift, an emerging web framework for Scala on Saturday, November 22nd, 2008, in Berkeley.  I am interested in Scala (and Lift) because Scala is a multi-paradigm language:  it combines functional and object-oriented programming.  I spent the last two years programming in Lisp and Prolog doing research on intelligent agents and machine learning at Stanford and I found myself missing Java:  especially the APIs and libraries and the well designed object-oriented aspects of the language.  On the other hand, I was often impressed by how powerful functional programming is:  one can write clean, compact, comprehensible code that radically changes or extends the behavior of a system surprisingly quickly.  My hope is that Scala will make it possible to have the best of both paradigms.

(continue reading…)