Scala is designed to show that a fusion of functional and object-oriented programming is possible and practical. What has changed is that at the time it came out FP was regarded as an academic niche. So it is difficult to make the case that FP should be needed in a mainstream language. XML literals were added to the language as a specific use case because we knew that traditional OO techniques had a hard time dealing with XML trees. Nowadays the tide has turned. Functional programming has become respectable, in some areas even mainstream, and it’s sometimes harder to make the case for good object-oriented design.

• Type of talk: Intro