/λ/ - programming

>>737
I'm pretty new to functional design, but I use java and OOP daily. In a nutshell why is it worth it for me to learn scala (aside from a purely academic interest)? Also does anyone here actually use scala on the job?

>>738
I use scala on the job daily, and previously used java on the job primarily.

I'd say why you should use functional design and why use scala are different questions, since it's perfectly OK to write nothing but side-effecting OO scala.

I'd say in a nutshell, scala's advantage is that it just has more language features. You can do everything you can do in java, plus more. Case classes and pattern matching dramatically cut down on boilerplate for everyday tasks, type classes allow you to have incredible libraries that would just be too cumbersome to bear in java, etc.

The main reason (and pretty much the definition) to use functional design is that it decreases your ability to make runtime mistakes from not calling side-effecting methods enough, in the right order, at the right time, or too much. Also makes doing things in parallel easier to reason about.

>>739
Okay, that makes sense. I think the thing that turned me off scala a couple years ago was the syntactical learning curve. Scala source is so dense I found myself taking 3-4x as long to understand a code snippet as a similar function in java. That and the backwards compatibility was awful, though that might have changed.

>>742
I found the syntax daunting at first too, but it's a pretty small initial hurdle. Once you know what the basic set of syntax rules are, everything is pretty easy.
Try one of the courses, I found that if I stuck through one of them that was about all I needed.

I've been learning Scala recently (mostly for use with Spark), and Eckel and Marsh's "Atomic Scala" is proving a useful guide.