Friday night was the first London Scala User Group meet-up, so it seems like the right time to say what I’ve learned so far about the language.
I’m not a functional programming person. My background, pre-Java and C, was dominated by POP-11 so it’s fair to say I’m more comfortable with imperative coding than anything else. But that’s kind of why Scala’s a serious consideration for me: it doesn’t force the functional stuff down your throat, but rather it’s all there, object and functional, so you can pick and choose.
Other compelling aspects of the language are: it runs on the JVM, which has had a huge engineering investment to make it as fast as it is today; has Java-like features, but looks like it lets you get your work done with less lines of code; and it’s strongly typed. In other words, it’s comfy for a Java person, while putting you in a position to use the funky actors and functional stuff, and maybe make even better use of those multi-core machines.
Here’s an example of less-lines-of-code thing. In Java, the type-safe idiom for iterating over a map is:
final Map<String, String> map = new HashMap<String, String>();
map.put("dog", "woof");
map.put("cat", "meow");
for(Map.Entry<String, String> entry : map.entrySet())
{
final String name = entry.getKey();
final String value = entry.getValue();
// do something with name and value here
}
The same code, just as strongly typed, in Scala is:
val map = Map[String,String]("dog" -> "woof", "cat" -> "meow")
for( (name,value) <- map) {
// do something with name and value here
}
Or, if you wanted that last part could be:
map.foreach( (pair) => ...do something with pair._1 and pair._2 here.. ).
If you’re interested in getting into this stuff, I found it useful to start with A Scala Tutorial for Java programmers PDF, then listen to Episode 62 of Software Engineering Radio, an interview with Martin Odersky on Scala (thanks to Dom for pointing that out to me).
After that, I think the best place to go is into your wallet and buy a copy of Programming in Scala: A comprehensive step-by-step guide. It’s a pre-print, with quite a few errors, but I’m pretty sure they’ll get cleaned up soon and it’ll be a great text.
