Scala Presentations and Interviews

Here’s a collection of some presentations & interviews on the Scala programming language I’ve come across in the last few months.

The great Parleys.com just posted Martin Odersky’s presentation on Scala from JavaPolis 2007 (last December in Belgium). They had previously posted an interview with Martin (from the same conference) which is interesting, but I find the long presentation much more helpful in placing Scala in the context of programming language development, feature set, etc.

Software Engineering Radio, which produces podcasts (often interview-based), also had an interview with Martin from late 2007.

There’s an older presentation, again by Martin, as part of Google Tech Talk’s series, from November 2006. This one is hampered by the problems that most of the Google Tech Talks all seem to suffer from: poor video quality, almost illegible presentation text (e.g. slides, bullet points), sometimes poor sound quality. It’s a shame, since the folks at Google, apart from good cafeteria food, also seem fortunate in the many top technical people who visit them to give presentations.

Lex Spoon, who works on the Scala team at LAMP/EPFL and is one of the co-authors of the in-progress Programming in Scala book–which I highly recommend–gave a great talk on Scala which is posted at InfoQ.

Bill Venners, programmer, author and creator of the Artima web community, appears in a podcast on JavaWorld where he also covers Scala. Bill is also co-author of the upcoming Programming in Scala book, and is the author of the ScalaTest unit-testing framework for Scala.