The correct way to try Scala

I was pleasantly surprised to read this morning a much more reasoned and thought out evaluation of Scala than has been circulating in recent times. Instead of pontificating on a subject with what seemed like only cursory knowledge and experience, the guys over at Thoughtworks decided to give it a proper shot and use it on a real project.

Much of their experiences resonate with my own when I first started adopting Scala, of which this I think is the most important:

When we started working on the project we were effectively writing Java in Scala and we’ve slowly learnt/introduced more Scala features into our code as time has passed.

This is the best approach for anyone wanting to try Scala and the one with which I see most people sticking with the language and realising it’s benefits. It can be quite alien at first but having the safety net of writing in a more familiar Java style can really help with the learning curve.