The evolution of a small Scala program

Update: there is a subtle bug in the code.

To my surprise, when I posted the last code snippet, members of the Scala community actually took some time to play around with it. Much thanks to everyone who took a look.

Eric Willigers suggests some small things to alleviate the akward parts of the code I originally posted.

David Pollak properly factors things out and introduces a more idiomatic way of gettin’ yer data o’er the wire.

Finally, Adrian Moors shows that it’s possible to write Haskell in any language.

Here is a code kata for you: meditate on each of these 4 ways of doing the same thing and decide which you think is best.