On: Graham’s Guide to Learning Scala

[silentbicycle]

> It's a complete reference to the language and I've never seen a reference that isn't huge.

Lua's reference is 112 pages. Just sayin'. (Also, online at http://www.lua.org/manual/5.1/ .)

[seanmcdirmid → silentbicycle]

All generalizations are false :)

Lua's design philosophy is to keep it simple, which works well for their user base and domain of use (lots of embedding in games as a scripting language). Scala is not meant to be a simple scripting language, its more like a power language. Both are very good languages.

[silentbicycle → seanmcdirmid]

Indeed, and Lua gets a lot simpler because it can shrug stuff outside its scope onto C.

(The Definition of Standard ML is also pretty short, though... ;) )

[bad_user → silentbicycle]

And Scala's is 191 pages, including blanks: http://www.scala-lang.org/docu/files/ScalaReference.pdf