Placeholder for a possible talk I am applying to give at OpenTech 2010 about Scala.
Title: Scala: functional programming, concurrency on the JVM
Scala is a relatively new general-purpose, open source programming language on the Java platform. It combines strong static typing with functional programming, a very flexible object system, great support for building concurrent, high-performance applications and a syntax that is comfortable for those coming from dynamic scripting languages like Python and Ruby. The talk consists of a high-level overview of the benefits of the language for developers, and shows how it can be used to build mashups, hacks and prototypes rapidly but cleanly, and take advantage of many mature open source libraries for processing linked data, working with the Semantic Web and APIs.
See Scala for Hackers and my personal site.