Scala for introductory CS

ABSTRACT With adoption by notable companies like Twitter, FourSquare, and Linked in and a position at the top of the second tier of languages in the RedMonk rankings, it is clear that Scala has become the leader among next-generation programming languages. Can the benefits of this hybrid functional/object-oriented language that have attracted many startups and cutting edge developers carry over into the classroom? In this workshop I will introduce participants to the Scala programming language and run them through the benefits that the language can bring to CS1 and CS2. We will start with the REPL and basic scripting environment for coding in the small and see how static typing with type inference can help you out early on. We then progress to look at the basic constructs of the language and show how the uniform syntax fixes many of those trouble spots that you often get with other languages, such as Java. We will spend time on the power and expressivity that the collections library brings to play through the functional aspects of the language and show how you can bring in GUIs and Graphics to keep things visual and more interesting. Some time will also be spent looking at parallelism in Scala.