Explaining Scala to Your Wife Through Knitting

On Friday night I was sitting in my kitchen coding up some Scala. (Oh, what excitement a having small, sleeping child brings to Friday nights!)

My wife, who is a die-hard knitter, came into the room and, having seen me do little in the evenings for the last few years except code Scala, asked, "Is Scala just the bee's knees?"

My response, purely from reflex, was "No. CODING is the bee's knees!"

"Sure," she said (with a roll of the eyes, I suspect), "but is it like knitting something really interesting? Compared to Java, I mean?"

"Not quite," I said, "it's like if you had electric knitting needles that would let you start off the row and once you've done the interesting bit, the needles take over and do the rest of the row for you. So you'd just knit the interesting bits, not the dumb bits. With Java, though, you spend a lot of time writing dumb stuff."

"Right," she said, "that would be cool."

Yes, it would be cool. Sadly for knitters, electric knitting needles do not exist. Java programmers, on the other hand, have the freedom to use Scala if we want to stop doing dumb stuff.

How would you explain Scala to your wife?