New Scala Article

IBM published my first Scala article today. It's on using Scala to work with XML. It was a lot of fun to write about Scala. I am very lucky to get to share something that I enjoy. However, it was also a little challenging. It is so easy to be so terse with Scala that it seemed to carry over into my writing. I thought it would have the opposite effect, i.e. I would feel like I would need to write a lot more to describe what was going on with Scala code than I would with Java. Instead I had to really force myself to be descriptive about things. I would look at some of the code and just think: "the reader does not need me to explain that, it is so obvious." That is a testimony to Scala. Its handling of XML takes advantage of its DSL-friendly nature. A lot of complex and powerful expressions in Scala simply do exactly what they look like they should do. Or maybe its just my mathematical mind that sees things that way, who knows. Anyways, I have another article in the works for developerWorks that will cover Lift, a web framework developed with Scala.