Scala is my favorite non-visual or text-based programming language. Scala is a functional object-oriented programming language has succeeded to combine almost all features I’d like to see in a programming language except the visual way of coding. Scala compiles to Java Virtual Machine and is fully interoperable with Java code. There was a nice introductory article on Artima a few days ago First Steps to Scala by Bill Venners, Martin Odersky and Lex Spoon. If you are into text-based programming, you should seriously take a look at this article.