901 

   901 There is much more to Scala, then I can possibly describe

   902 here. There are a number of free books about Scala and of 

   903 course lots of help online.

   904 

   905 While I am quite enthusiastic about Scala, I am happy to admit

   906 that it has more than a fair share of faults. The problem of

   907 having to give an explicit type to {\tt toSet}, but not {\tt

   908 toList} is one of them. There are also many ``deep'' things

   909 about types in Scala, which even to me seasoned functional

   910 programmer are puzzling. While implicits are great, they

   911 can also be a source of great head-aches, for example

   912 

   913 \begin{quote}

   914 \begin{alltt}

   915 scala>  List (1, 2, 3) contains "your mom"

   916 res1: Boolean = false

   917 \end{alltt}

   918 \end{quote}

   919 

   920 \noindent This should raise a typing-error, but it does not.

   921 

   922 While Scala has been a success in several high-profile

   923 companies, there is also a company, Yammer, which first used

   924 Scala in their production code but then moved away from it.

   925 According to Wikipedia, they did not like steep learning curve

   926 of Scala and also that new versions of Scala often introduced

   927 incompatibilities.

   928 

   929 So all in all, Scala might not be a great teaching

   930 language, but I hope this is mitigated by the fact that I

   931 never require from you to write any Scala code. You only

   932 need to be able to read it. In the coursework you can use

   933 any programming language you like. If you want to use

   934 Scala for this, be my guest; if you do not, stick with the

   935 language you are most familiar with.