An exploration of why Scala's List library is implemented in a procedural style. The answer: performance. The commenters have some interesting alternate implementations.
The last nine months I have been running my own business together with some friends (Triental AB). We are building a product suite for private banking and wealth management with a focus on portfolio management, analysis and simulation.
There are a number of differences between Java and Scala syntax that can make reading Scala code a bit of a challenge for Java programmers when first encountering Scala. This primer attempts to explain those differences. It is aimed at Java programmers, so some details about syntax which are the same as Java are omitted.
In an earlier post, I had talked about scaling out the service layer of your application using actors and asynchronous processing. This can buy you some more donuts over and above your current throughput. With extra processing in the form of n actors pounding the cores of your CPU, the database will still be the bottleneck and SPOF. As long as you have a single database, there will be latency and you will have to accept it.