Having that said, if all you want is to "switch from imperative language X to Scala", (e.g. from Java) and you want to learn first how to do the "non functional" stuff in Scala, then keep in mind that this course is teaching functional programming first, Scala later. You can do (if you want) very imperative and object oriented style of coding in Scala but this course is not focusing on that part of the language (not because it's bad, but simply because the course is about functional programming)
With that said, go and enroll, it's one of the best coursera courses I took. Great videos, and very interesting programming assignments (many are adaptations from SICP I later learned) and great forum discussions.
It's also by Martin Odersky, but also with Erik Meijer and Roland Kuhn.
Very nice, with a focus on interpretation and comparison points between paradigms.
Curious to test out build times in 2.11, sounds like some minor gains have been made there, and more to come in the 2.11 release cycle as the new scalac optimiser is integrated (http://magarciaepfl.github.io/scala/)
SBT does the heavy lifting (have automatic build turned off in Eclipse) while Eclipse provides the dev environment.
Really snappy, zero spurious errors, it's like night and day compared to 3 years ago, woo hoo ;-)
In database (or Actor ask) heavy code dealing with a lot of Futures async/await has the potential to fairly significantly influence code style. for-comprehensions often don't cut it when you're dealing with a Future[Option[User]] and need to pull in their assigned roles from a Future[Seq[Role]].
val userOption = db.get(userId) flatMap {
case None => Future.successful(None)
case Some(user) =>
Future.sequence {
user.roleIds map(db.get(_))
} map { roles =>
Some(user.copy(roles = roles.flatten))
}
}
val userOption = async {
for {
user <- await(db.get(userId))
roles = await(Future.sequence(user.roleIds map(db.get(_))))
} yield user.copy(roles = roles.flatten)
}
If you aren't familiar with Monad Transformers, yes, it can be tricky. However it's trivial using an Option monad transformer (OptionT[Future,A]]) to have the same semantics.
for {
user <- OptionT(db.get(userId)
mappedRoles = user.roleIds.map(db.get(_))
roles <- mappedRoles.sequence.liftM //goes to OptionT[Future,A]]
} yield user.copy(roles = roles.flatten)
Java 8 is the most exciting release since Java 2 in my opinion.
There's quite lot of discussion around the compiler performance improvements.
I've bumped up against that limit pretty bad while trying to deserialize json. Shapeless did a lot to solve the problem, but I'm sure glad that limit has been removed.
You could also work at evangelizing Scala in your current (presumably) Java shop. I've found success with this approach by getting other developers interested in the language and mentoring them, especially during the steeper parts of the learning curve. If you can pique the interest of a good portion of the development team it's often not too difficult to get a new language introduced through smaller non-critical or non-production systems, which is a good foothold with which to get the benefits visible to the wider group. YMMV of course.
Even this low bar eliminates 90% of candidates so it won't take much for you to shine at this level.
If you're snr then you might find yourself actually having to introduce Scala at a Java shop. Run dojos, lunchtime lightning/brown bag talks and lever it in as a testing framework or throwaway prototype. If that doesn't work, start questioning what you did to deserve being called snr.
jared at nestlabs dot com
https://speakerdeck.com/heathermiller/spores-distributable-f...
2.11 set the tone for the remainder of the 2.x cycle: smaller, faster, stabler. 2.12 will focus on Java 8 support and making it (even) easier to learn and use Scala.
We're also working on making the compiler a better platform for others to innovate on -- originally via compiler plugins, now using reflection & macros. A lot of cool stuff is happening outside core Scala, such as scala.js, and we hope to spur on that trend.
(I'm the Scala Tech Lead at Typesafe.)