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There are quite a few reports about the happenings on Scala LiftOff, so I’ll just summarize my personal experiences, which might have been quite different from others:

• This was the first time I posed as the sponsor. The sponsor part sucked, since it made me feel I bought my way in there :) At the same time we got some attention, which was good. And the community itself was great!
• Scala selling points are static types, DSLs and actors. Lift selling points are AJAX and Comet. Everything else is just eye candy.
• Scala really needs proper clustering, persistence and transactions on top of Actor library (or rather beneath it?). I wasn’t sold that actor-d is that, although it could be on the way there. A lot of architects having to deal with JMS will be sold on that.
• Martin doesn’t care about legal issues. Someone else has to start caring or there will be trouble later
• Unconference is a great social event and facilitates discussion wonderfully. It is not that good for talks though. Some mixture would fit engineering gettogethers better, I think.

All in all it was a great experience and I hope participate next year as well. And for your viewing pleasure, here’s a shot of Martin Odersky from a different perspective: