Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hands-on Scala Programming

handsonscala.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 108 posts

Re: Hands-on Scala Programming

#41

Post by brianyu8 »

lihaoyi wrote: post #21
christiansakai wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's the main problem. Everyone writes Scala differently. In Go pretty much everything is quite similar. In JavaScript people also write things differently, like any other language really, but in Scala it is compounded. Is there a concrete example of the Python-like code vs the more complex ones? I appreciate the help. I'm thinking what language next should I pick up. It is either OCaml or Scala.

> Is there a concrete example of the Python-like code vs the more complex ones? I appreciate the help. Haha this book is going to be 400 pages of concrete examples. It's not out yet, so you'll have to take my word for it for the next few weeks while the last round of reviews and editing are incorporated into the manuscript. If you're interested, put your email down and I'll let you know when it's ready!

I've been wanting to learn more Scala and this book seems perfect! I'm definitely going to buy it when it comes out. The website mentions that there's a PDF download of the free chapters, but I can't seem to actually find it. Do you have a direct link?

Re: Hands-on Scala Programming

#42

Post by _nckn »

dr0l3 wrote: post #24

Some context for people who have limited knowledge of Scala. Lihaoyi is one of the most prolific coder's, not just in Scala, but in any language. He looks like he is much to humble and modest to claim so himself, so I will do it for him. Here is a by no means exhaustive list of projects - A buildtool - A bash replacement that speaks Scala - A test framework - A parsing library - Ports of several python libraries in S…

I think your argument here is counterproductive. Lihaoyi is a prolific coder but most coder like me are average Joe. How can Scala be useful and make average Joe like me productive. The fact that Lihaoyi is a prolific coder in any language does not help selling Scala.

Re: Hands-on Scala Programming

#43

Post by christiansakai »

lihaoyi wrote: post #2

I didn't post this, but cool to see this up here! The full book is ~400 pages and will be released Summer 2020 (i.e. soon!). If you're interested in being notified when it comes out, there's a mailing list link on the page and I'll let you know when it's out. There will be both E-Books as well as paperbacks & hardcovers (assuming the supply-chains are still open in this COVID-19 global environment...) The first 5 cha…

Looks like Scala instead of OCaml is in my next language to learn.

Re: Hands-on Scala Programming

#44

Post by throwaway_pdp09 »

nafizh wrote: post #28
lihaoyi wrote: post #2

I didn't post this, but cool to see this up here! The full book is ~400 pages and will be released Summer 2020 (i.e. soon!). If you're interested in being notified when it comes out, there's a mailing list link on the page and I'll let you know when it's out. There will be both E-Books as well as paperbacks & hardcovers (assuming the supply-chains are still open in this COVID-19 global environment...) The first 5 cha…

Will this be a good book to learn your first functional language?

Functional programming is a style or pattern. If a language gives you basic stuff, you can do that pattern.

I learned a bit of haskell a long time ago - mind blown kind of time - then found javascript had closures (erm, kind of a way of turning functions into objects-with-state-that-still-look-like-functions) and functions as first class objects (meaning a function can be passed around exactly like and integer or a string) and so I used it in javascript. Google up "javascript functional" and see what happens. Do some exercises.

Beware there are libraries out there that make simple functional Jscript stuff look entirely unnecessarily complicated.

And when you're ready, pick up this guy's book!

Edit: that may have come across a bit insulting towards the author. All I'm saying is you can learn the functional stuff while you wait for the book to come out. And when you have the functional stuff under your belt, get the book and you'll be one large step better prepared to dive into it - scala has a lot more to offer than just functional programming, and the book will surely cover a lot of ground.

Re: Hands-on Scala Programming

#45

Post by spir »

petilon wrote: post #23

This book has a section on "Why Scala" but not on "Why Functional Programming". What is interesting about Scala, if you already know Java (and most CS grads already do), is that Scala is a functional language. Anyone know of a good book or article that gives an overview of functional programming and answers the question of "Why Functional Programming", without going into details any one functional language?

Btw, I find a lot about Scala to be interesting besides that it supports pure functional programming.

For me, Scala is much nicer for imperative/OOP than Java, in ways that aren't just skin deep.

https://medium.com/@ryanberckmans/why-i-like-scala-45e65cde3...

Re: Hands-on Scala Programming

#46

Post by taikawatiti »

lihaoyi wrote: post #2

I didn't post this, but cool to see this up here! The full book is ~400 pages and will be released Summer 2020 (i.e. soon!). If you're interested in being notified when it comes out, there's a mailing list link on the page and I'll let you know when it's out. There will be both E-Books as well as paperbacks & hardcovers (assuming the supply-chains are still open in this COVID-19 global environment...) The first 5 cha…

I can vouch for lihaoyi. He is one of the more prolific people in the scala community writing top notch stuff. The best part about most of the stuff be writes is they are extremely ergonomic, even by scala standards. Look at either scala-tags or even better his parsing library. The parsing library is actialy so good you'll feel like finding more problems to solve. Its a breeeze to get started with (even in repl). Scala-tags also is amazing and has spawned other similar projects , one of which is laminar which is currently one of the top scala-js frameworks.

In fact I can probably say this for a lot of his work, anyone learning from him would probably learn a user centric way of library design.

Re: Hands-on Scala Programming

#49

Post by therealdrag0 »

christiansakai wrote: post #7

I work JavaScript/TypeScript day to day, but I like Python syntax and easiness but also like Go's concurrency. Having learned Haskell and Rust in the past, these days I appreciate simpler language. In what way does Scala have Python's convenience and Go's concurrency? Based on talking to a few people that used Scala in the past they said they wouldn't use it again and they said I probably wouldn't like it.

My anecdote: if I were to go from Java to Go I would have been I impressed with its ease of concurrency, but going from Java to Scala to Go, I was unimpressed. I already had simplicity of concurrency with Scala without feeling primitive like I did with Go.
Post reply on HN