kern f

delicious scala

I stumbled upon the Scala Programming Language a while ago. So far it seems like a dream come true: a functional/object-oriented language with first-class functions, currying, anonymous functions, lazy evaluation, constructor decomposition and pattern matching, a modern and powerful type system (for more on types look here and here) and on top of that transparent access to the rich Java world of code because it runs in the Java VM. The tools are still in a basic stage but this will hopefully change soon too.

I played a little with it, ported my Haskell code snippets to it and it's cool. So I thought I should try a more useful example that actually solves a need: I'm a big fan of Delicious Library but it always bugged me that it didn't export to Bibtex. Luckily DL keeps its data in a xml file so I wrote a little scala program that does the exporting to Bibtex. It's pretty basic and doesn't deal with encodings and escaping funny characters to the TeX syntax but it does a decent enough job for my books collection.