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.