So charming. So clever.

I like Linklater’s rambling dialogue, so I overcame my worry that this was just a romantic comedy and gave it a run up the flagpole. It wasn’t as bad as a romantic comedy, which was a relief, but it wasn’t especially gripping. I think I failed to identify with the main characters. Maybe I’m getting old.

Sedaris continues to be damned funny even as he crosses from the rich fields of his past into the perilously self-indulgent world of his present.

Scala has piqued my interest more than any language to come down the pike in a long time. Type inference makes me cry out with joy, Java-compatibility, sensible mix-in support (made all the more useful by their very sophisticated type system), first-class functions, continuations (mostly), very SML-like type pattern matching, list comprehensions. One could get into some serious trouble with this language.

I was then even more excited when I saw a paper by the language designer describing how he was able to easily implement an elegant stackless threads system as a library using only the functionality provided by the language (and the small compromise of requiring a continuation passing style, but the elegance of the language construct being used makes that hardly noticable).

I wish I wasn’t mired in a bastard mashup of Java, JavaScript and ActionScript at the moment. I’ll have to wait a bit before giving Scala a thorough run around the block.