Today’s meeting of Geneva JUG was the most entertaining User Group meeting I’ve attended. Excellent speakers, great topics, mind-blowing ideas…

Iulian Dragos had an introductory talk about Scala. This isn’t my first meeting with Scala, but today I’ve “got it” a bit more. Not at the level to wiling to use it and start writing apps, but I’ve understood some ideas and concepts behind it. For me it sometimes looked like C# with all the language noise stripped down as it has some language constructs very similar with dynamics, vars and functions in C#. And also it remembered me a bit about Boo, a strongly-typed language based on .NET runtime. Nice language with interesting features that failed to get enough traction in .NET world.

Oh, and then was the Jonas Bonèr, talking about Akka. What a great talk. As I’ve been diving deeper last weeks in distributed systems (and using NServiceBus to get some parts of architecture right) it was a real eye opener. Jonas was talking about three main problems in distributed world – scalability, fault-tolerance and remote interactions. Those concepts are pretty platform agnostic. But for me, living mostly in .NET word, it was very entertaining to see how things are implementing using other language on a different platform. Jonas, like a magician, where pulling from pockets akka pieces and concepts – one greater that another. And I should admit it’s something I’ve never seen in .NET. Scala’s flexibility and extensibility allows getting really complex things wrapped in a clean syntax and simple flow. Things like new async syntax in C# 5 are looking now as badly put shortcuts and “not so sweet” syntactic sugar when compared to what Scala has to offer.

And a big thanks to organizers of this session. Keep up rolling, guys…