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My take on "Should I care about Scala?" question: - If you're average or below average developer: the language does not matter. Focus on algorithms and read ot

by CCs 14y ago

My take on "Should I care about Scala?" question: - If you're average or below average developer: the language does not matter. Focus on algorithms and read other people's code a lot. - If you are using anything other than Java: consider testing Scala ( * ). You might learn great new ways of writing code, especially if you never used Functional Programming before. - If you're above average developer programming in Java: you have to learn Scala now! Soon having "Java" on your resume without "Scala" will suggest "this person's skills are outdated" or "this is a junior developer". ( * ) I just put together a small starter project, no dependencies: https://github.com/csoma/Scala-starter https://github.com/csoma/Scala-starter

binarymax 14y ago
So my colleage recommended we look into spark, which looks pretty neat, but said a caveat would be that we would need to learn scala. My first impression of your bare minimum is "holy crap that's a lot of boilerplate for a bare minimum project". While I expected there to be some code necessary to get thing up and running, my mind spun at that 400loc build script. What the heck is that for if you are not actually doing anything? Also, I have some experience with lisp as a functional language...What are all this crazy symbols doing in your main scala file? :Unit=\n ?? I hate to be critical, but what on earth is going on here? It's not exactly welcoming, by any means.
- CCs 14y ago
  You don't have to use the sbt script provided here. It's just for convenience: it will automatically install Java, Scala and dependencies. Run it and you don't have to hunt down anything from the web. If you have SBT already installed (with homebrew, MSI, apt-get etc), you don't need that file at all. Main.scala is a "println", Build.scala sets some compiler flags and project name - this is all. About "Unit": Scala is strongly typed. In exchange you will not have run-time type errors and also you don't need type checking unit tests.
  - binarymax 14y ago
    Thanks for the response. Given it's going to the JVM I should have been more prepared for verbosity. I did a bit more reading and with your suggestions it seems my initial reaction is mostly just shock of a change from what I'm used to. I'll do some more research and will probably mellow out a bit :) Any suggestions on ebooks or otherwise to get started? Cheers!
    - CCs 14y ago
      I updated the README with some additional info. Java and Scala have essentially the same bytecode output as both compilers were written by Martin Odersky. There are many links below: free books, PDFs, articles, videos, tutorials. Or just Google "The busy Java developer's guide to Scala" (article), "Scala for the impatient" (PDF), "A Tour of Scala", "An Introduction to Scala for Java Developers" (about REPL) etc.

by CCs 14y ago

binarymax 14y ago

So my colleage recommended we look into spark, which looks pretty neat, but said a caveat would be that we would need to learn scala. My first impression of your bare minimum is "holy crap that's a lot of boilerplate for a bare minimum project". While I expected there to be some code necessary to get thing up and running, my mind spun at that 400loc build script. What the heck is that for if you are not actually doing anything? Also, I have some experience with lisp as a functional language...What are all this crazy symbols doing in your main scala file? :Unit=\n ?? I hate to be critical, but what on earth is going on here? It's not exactly welcoming, by any means.

CCs 14y ago
You don't have to use the sbt script provided here. It's just for convenience: it will automatically install Java, Scala and dependencies. Run it and you don't have to hunt down anything from the web. If you have SBT already installed (with homebrew, MSI, apt-get etc), you don't need that file at all. Main.scala is a "println", Build.scala sets some compiler flags and project name - this is all. About "Unit": Scala is strongly typed. In exchange you will not have run-time type errors and also you don't need type checking unit tests.
- binarymax 14y ago
  Thanks for the response. Given it's going to the JVM I should have been more prepared for verbosity. I did a bit more reading and with your suggestions it seems my initial reaction is mostly just shock of a change from what I'm used to. I'll do some more research and will probably mellow out a bit :) Any suggestions on ebooks or otherwise to get started? Cheers!
  - CCs 14y ago
    I updated the README with some additional info. Java and Scala have essentially the same bytecode output as both compilers were written by Martin Odersky. There are many links below: free books, PDFs, articles, videos, tutorials. Or just Google "The busy Java developer's guide to Scala" (article), "Scala for the impatient" (PDF), "A Tour of Scala", "An Introduction to Scala for Java Developers" (about REPL) etc.