Scala

[[deleted user]]

Installation on my Mac: "brew install scala"

Scala was a nice relief from Prolog!

I really like the ideas and design decisions in this language. It smartly leverages the JVM and offers Java interoperation, although this was not discussed in detail in this chapter. More importantly, it strips Java of much of its formality, which translates to less typing (pun intended). Actually, the static typing is very much present, but the type inference engine means that you don't always have to explicitly type. I did, however, find that sometimes the compiler couldn't figure out the type, and I had to go back and be more explicit. Also, many times the Java underbelly shows through, especially with compiler error messages. Sometimes they are short and sweet and helpful, and at other times I get pages of output (usually with typing errors). Perhaps, other compilers would offer a purer environment.

Scala meshes two paradigms: OO and functional. When learning a paradigm, I prefer starting with a pure language, because it forces you to either figure out the paradigm or the program doesn't work. In multiparadigm languages, like Scala, it is too easy to fall back on the familiar. After the paradigm learning curve, my preferences reverse, and I find languages like Scala that support many tools for problem solving very satisfying.

The concurrency constructs look very interesting, and hide the word "thread" (which is a good thing), but I would need to try other, non-toy, examples to better evaluate it.

The exercises were straight forward, although on the Day 3 exercise, I started down the path of treating the HTML as XML, and got tangled up in API documentation, so I went the string/regular expression route. BTW, I found that the documentation for a class is split into two separate pages, one for the instance methods (keyword class) and one for the class methods (keyword object), but I couldn't find an easy bridge between the two, which was annoying.

[Erik]

I found the java similarities comforting (even though I'm a java novice). The comments in the book about being java-like to gain acceptance made a lot of sense.