Functional from the Roots Up: Why Java Devs Should Look at Scala | Voxxed

Functional from the Roots Up: Why Java Devs Should Look at Scala | Voxxed:




So aside from ignoring that joke, say a Java developer says, “I’m kind of interested in Scala, I’m going to check some stuff out”…have you got any advice for them to leave at the door?


One piece of advice I gave in the session is that there are a lot of syntactic constructs in Scala that look like Java, but they’re not.


The one that I really focused on, which Twitter picked up, was the notion of the for loop in Scala. It’s not really a for loop – it’s a for comprehension, is the term they use, and it’s actually a different creature entirely from what we’re used to in Java. The other thing that I think a lot of people coming from Java, coming into Scala, will find very powerful is pattern matching. It kind of on the surface looks like a switch case, but that’s kind of like saying a kitten looks like a T-Rex.


There’s a huge order of magnitude more power in pattern matching, to the point where, if you took away every other control construct from me, and just left me with pattern matching, I’d be OK. Because, it can do fls, it can do all this other decision making, etc, etc. It’s an extraordinarily powerful construct.


The last thing you probably need to do is let go of some of the obsessive desire that Java developers have around the physical construction of their code…You shouldn’t really have to worry about some of the physical details, as long as it all works. And so, a Java developer is going to have to, to quote Yoda – which is always a good one to quote – “Unlearn you must.”