Comments on: Scalaz moved to Google Code

By: Mirco

Mirco — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 05:55:33 +0000

Hi Daniel,

Scala does indeed means “staircase” in Italian, however I remember my initial surprise when I hit the language back at EPFL and my first reaction was “why in earth Scala should stand for staircase?”, what’s the point?

And honestly what I found out right after was that Scala has been called that way because it is intended to be a Scalable language, targeting module separation and higher reuse. My memory can be misleading me, but it sure does sound more credible than naming a language after a funny (but rather stupid) Italian substantive

Then, when it comes to pronunciation, I just go the Italian way and I actually never paid too much attention on that, since the sound appeared (to my untrained hears) close enough

By: Tony Morris

Tony Morris — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 20:24:13 +0000

Hi Seth,
I have added links to the Scalaz home page.

By: Seth Tisue

Seth Tisue — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 18:16:05 +0000

Maybe I’m missing an obvious link somewhere, but how do I get to the scaladoc?

By: Daniel Spiewak

Daniel Spiewak — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 02:13:06 +0000

Pronunciation copy-pasted from “Programming in Scala” (2008 Odersky, Spoon, Venners)

1 Scala is pronounced skah-lah

More canonically, “Scala” is from the Italian word for “staircase”. Italian doesn’t have a long “a” sound, and like *most* Latin-derivatives its spelling is pretty straight (”l” really is a “l” sound).

By: Tony Morris

Tony Morris — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 00:36:17 +0000

Regarding pronunciation, I am simply following Odersky with his tongue-in-cheek remark at 1:15-1:20 in http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=553859542692229789

By: Tony Morris

Tony Morris — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 00:33:41 +0000

Scala is the target language of Reductio (formerly - now Functional Java fj.test) too so you still get all the advantages of Scala. ScalaCheck and Reductio have an intersection of features and each has its own features. Specifically, you’d use fj.test if you to use Java. Also, there is a fundamental difference between Reductio and ScalaCheck in its Gen implementation which has far-reaching consequences for both (I’d like to implement both variations in Java).

I still use and contribute (I am a committer) to ScalaCheck where necessary. Indeed Functional Java is tested with ScalaCheck.

By: Daniel Spiewak

Daniel Spiewak — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 23:44:02 +0000

Oh, out of curiosity: why Reductio rather than ScalaCheck? It would seem to me that the latter would be quite a bit nicer when Scala is the target language.

By: Daniel Spiewak

Daniel Spiewak — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 23:42:32 +0000

Cool! BTW, you do know that 90% of the English-speaking world would pronounce it “Scah-lah” rather than “Scar-lah” (particularly since that’s the official word handed down by our Supreme Overload).

The “-zed” suffix is interesting too. I always pronounced it “Scah-lah-zee”, but obviously that’s mainly my American tongue showing. “Zed” sounds better in this case.