Cool. I've been writing Scala and Clojure wrappers for a larger Java project, and I ran into a minor hassle last week with Scala/Java integration and I read something that indicated that things would be easier with Scala 2.8. I am downloading the beta right now to see if there are any problems using it with InteliJ 9.

Trying 2.8 did break some of my code (as expected from reading the 2.8 beta docs)

Scala/Java integration will always be somewhat of a problem, that requires thought and effort to get right. Any default way of converting between classes will leave some people going "WTF?". Jorge Ortiz's scala-javautils[1] can be helpful. Googling for these utils will lead to some blogposts discussing the problems of fully automatic conversion.

[1] http://github.com/jorgeortiz85/scala-javautils

Named and especially default arguments is the win for me. I couldn't bring myself to start ripping out our Java code just to have to do all of the same silly method duplication all over the place.

For me, too. I learned Scala for a project last semester and named/default arguments were the one thing I missed the most.

I haven't been this excited about a new programming language version in a long time. It almost feels like a bigger deal than the change from Java 1.4 to 1.5!

They didn't expand much on the improvements to actors and support for continuations, both of which are quite interesting.

Actors: http://www.scala-lang.org/node/2041

Continuations: http://www.scala-lang.org/node/2096

Along with the new language version comes a new, completely rewritten Eclipse plugin, which can be installed using the update site:

http://www.scala-lang.org/scala-eclipse-plugin-beta-preview

Apparently expressing emotion is bad

Care to elaborate?