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After the horse has bolted: Option in Scala vs null in Java
When I first came to Scala a few months ago , one of the things I'd heard was to avoid using null and use the Option class instead. Great, I thought. So instead of: I'd write:
Building a Plugin Based Architecture in Scala « Inphina Thoughts
i 3 Votes A plugin based architecture has many advantages. Some of the common ones include Extending an application’s functionality without compiling it again Adding functionality without requiring access to the original source code. Replacing or adding new functionality becomes easy Help in organizing large projects Help in extending the functionality of the system to unimagined areas.
Scala School
Other Languages: Русский About Scala school started as a series of lectures at Twitter to prepare experienced engineers to be productive Scala programmers. Scala is a relatively new language, but draws on many familiar concepts. Thus, these lectures assumed the audience knew the concepts and showed how to use them in Scala. We found this an effective way of getting new engineers up to speed quickly.Is Scala really too complex for average developers?
I have been evaluating Scala for quite some time now as an alternative to Java for enterprise development and one of the most common criticisms I have seen against Scala is that it is too complex for average developers. A quick Google search on Scala Complexity returns numerous links to blogs both defending and criticizing Scala for its perceived complexity. In my opinion one key aspect that has been ignored in this debate is that adoption of a framework/language/whatever in a large enterprise is almost never about technology per say, but has more to do with the culture of the organization. To better understand the statement ‘Scala is too complex for average developers’, we will have to dig a little bit deeper into the prevalent culture in most IT departments in large enterprise today. This can be done by slightly tweaking the Type XY theories created and developed by Douglas McGregor at MIT in 1960s.
Let me first say that I am a Scala lover and have been a Scala champion for almost 5 years. I've written books and articles on Scala. I've worked with dozens of companies that have launched Scala and Lift projects. I've code reviewed many dozens of Scala projects. I used to think that Scala was easy. It was, and continues to be, a cure for some of the numerous problems with Java.
Yes, Virginia, Scala is hard - Good Stuff
Roundup: Scala for Java Refugees
13 Feb 2008 To be honest, I’m somewhat kicking myself for writing this post. As I’ve said many times: roundup posts are for people who are too lazy to write real content. I can’t tell you how many blogs I’ve come across which have a roundup-to-post ratio of easily 3:1. You know it’s a bad sign when sites start having roundups of their roundups… Meta-roundups aside, I decided (after much deliberation) that a single post linking to all six parts of the series would be useful to one or two people.
Manifests: Reified Types
Reification (n.): When an abstract concept [...] is treated as a concrete 'thing'. [1] When Java-the-language added generic types in version 1.5, Java-the-virtual-machine (JVM) did not. Generic types are a fiction of the compiler. They exist at compile time, but they are omitted from the generated bytecode and are therefore unavailable at run time. This phenomenon is known as erasure .
Comparing Apples to Pears in Scala - or Abstract Types to the Rescue
Abstract types in Scala can make your life much easier. In this blog I’m going to recap my intellectual journey to compare ‘apples to pears’ in a typesafe manner, which led me to abstract types. My quest was to write code, which enables me to compare different kinds of currencies as elegant as possible. What I wanted was a very simple DSL with which I could do the following:Scala 2.9 introduced parallel collections , which mirror most of the existing collections with a parallel version. Collections that have been parallelized this way have received a new method called par which magically parallelize certain operations on this collection. For example, here is a sequential version: And the parallel version (notice the extra par keyword): Obviously, the ordering will change each time you run the parallel version.
Scala’s parallel collections
What features of Java have been dropped in Scala?
Despite more complex and less intuitive syntax compared to Java, Scala actually drops several features of Java, sometimes for good, other times providing replacements on the standard library level. As you will see soon, Scala isn’t a superset of Java (like Groovy) and actually removes a lot of noise. Below is a catalogue of the missing features . break and continue in loops
Scala 2.8 Collections API -- Conversions between Java and Scala collections
Like Scala, Java also has a rich collections library. There are many similarities between the two. For instance, both libraries know iterators, iterables, sets, maps, and sequences. But there are also important differences. In particular, the Scala libraries put much more emphasis on immutable collections, and provide many more operations that transform a collection into a new one.Odds are, you don’t use a functional programming language every day. You probably aren’t getting paid to write code in Scala, Haskell, Erlang, F#, or a Lisp Dialect. The vast majority of people in the industry use OO languages like Python, Ruby, Java or C#–and they’re happy with them. Sure, they might occasionally use a “functional feature” like “blocks” now and then, but they aren’t writing functional code. And yet, for years we’ve been told that functional languages are awesome. I still remember how confused I was when I first read ESR’s famous essay about learning Lisp.
Functional Programming Is Hard,That's Why It's Good
Playing with Scala’s pattern matching « Kerflyn's Blog
How many times have you been stuck in your frustration because you were unable to use strings as entries in switch-case statements. Such an ability would be really useful for example to analyze the arguments of your application or to parse a file, or any content of a string. Meanwhile, you have to write a series of if-else-if statements (and this is annoying).This series is intended as a guided tour of some type-level programming I have done in Scala. It generally consists of code and examples with a few lines of explanation. It is usually assumed that the reader understands the features of Scala’s type system. This is not always a good assumption about either the author or the reader of course, so comments and questions are welcome. The series is in 10 parts, with some parts consisting of more than one post each. The present post will serve as a table of contents linking to the rest of the series, so bookmark this page for easy reference.