The Planetarium

If you are think about adding a new language to your programming language history, then you are probably following the recent discussions about whether Scala will replace the Java language, summarized here at InfoQ and with a followup from James 'Groovy' Strachan here.

Scala is an object oriented and functional language, like many other JVM languages. Yet unlike many of today's JVM langauges is statically typed. It's been implemented on other platforms (.NET, Android) but still primarily appears to be used on the Java SE 6 VMs. It's been through a couple iterations since its first release in late 2003, and although typically Scala programs use the underlying Java APIs, frameworks are starting to appear for Scala, most notably, Lift, for web app development.

And NetBeans seems to be ahead of the curve in its support for Scala.

A nice way to see if you agree it could replace Java one day.