Effective Scala video with Josh Suresh

Just saw Josh Sueresh's talk posted on YouTube identifying "Effective Scala" (not a book, just a video) much of which is in his almost released book, "Scala in Depth". Awesome stuff!

In other news, Scala is quickly promoting from Trial to Adopt in the ThoughtWorks industry survey (item 98 in the image to the right). This is a HUGE deal in terms of future development, contract and job opportunities. I couldn't be happier to be riding this wave. It's going to be as good or better than even the Java wave I rode in 1998-2006. Yeeehaaa!

What draws me to Scala...

I just ran across this article, "Comparing Java and Scala’s Expressiveness". It so succinctly describes how I feel as I learn Scala. It's not just the reduced boilerplate. It's something about feeling like I am doing more real software engineering work as opposed to a huge amount of paperwork (boilerplate) with a tiny amount of actual software engineering!

A core principle behind functional programming...

I just stumbled upon a Wiki link on twitter about "Persistent data structure". After reading it, I think this is one of the essential implementation points behind any functional programming language, including Scala. Now, I just have to figure out how to think like this for myself as I design and implement my own programs. I'm learning so much as I get deeper and deeper into Scala and functional programming.

Functional Programming, Scala, LWJGL, Space Invader (note the lack of plural) and Programmers Exchange...

I've been mulling on the problem of how one might go about writing a simple video game, like Space Invaders, in Scala (using LWJGL) in as pure a functional programming design approach as possible. I'd planned to write my post shortly after Thanksgiving. However, I let the merrymaking of the holidays get the better of me and postponed writing the post.

Finally, on the way home this evening, I decided to spend at least 5 minutes writing up a question to post on Stack Overflow. Then, when I went to go about generating the post, I realized that Stack Exchange (the parent site of Stack Overflow and many other sites analogous to Stack Overflow) had a site more suited to my general question, Programmers Exchange. I then spent the five minutes writing the start of a post. And now, +2 hours later, I finally hit the submit button.

You can find the resulting post here. I'm looking forward to all the learnin' headed my way. I have the uncomfortable feeling I am going to feel a whole lot stupider around functional programming and Scala before I begin to grow the feeling of confidence emerging from nurturing my growing competence confidence. Or something like that, anyway. {smirk}