Jon Pretty
At Scala Days, the Scala Center will hold its first Advisory Board meeting. The Advisory Board comprises primarily of delegates from our sponsors. But, we exist as an organization to support the entire Scala community, so for that reason, our founding documents allow for a “community representative” to sit on the board; someone who can speak for the whole community.
A Community Representative
Who should fulfil the role of community representative is an important choice for The Scala Center to make. The Scala community needs someone independent, technically capable, and universally respected. So Heather, Martin and I considered a few names we thought could take on the task. It’s an indication of the wealth of great people who actively involve themselves in our community that the three of us came up with so many potential candidates, but close to the top of everyone’s shortlist was one person: Bill Venners. And we’re delighted to announce today that Bill has accepted our invitation, and will be the community representative on the Advisory Board.
Bill is best known as the author of the ScalaTest testing framework and co-author of the Programming in Scala book, soon to have its third edition published. But he also develops the Scalactic library, is a frequent speaker at Scala conferences, and offers training in Scala through Artima and Escalate Software.
Bill has a long history of involvement in Scala, and I remember back to the early days of Scala’s development when Bill would take the time to engage in long discussions with the other members on the Scala mailing lists as we tried, together, to figure out Scala, its various features, and how we could best employ them to our advantage. Looking back, I can’t think of anyone who devoted more time to listening to and trying to understand the various different ideas (and Scala is a language that accommodates alternative perspectives more than almost any other!) being discussed within the Scala community.
We are extremely happy that Bill is going to join the advisory board and continue providing his valued guidance on some of the important issues that Scala will face in the future.