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Scala School

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Re: Scala School

#7

Post by pcx »

Learning Scala is such a pain. Either you follow a large book completely and master it across several months/years or go through overly complicated online guides and get discouraged. I understand it's a large, advanced language, but the community has to seriously work on making things a bit easier for beginners like me. Just look at how easy it is to learn Go or Rust, their official tutorials are amazing and free on the web.

Here is what worked for me to learn the basics well: I started off with the book 'Scala for the Impatient', the first half of the book is freely available. I then used Scala School as a list of topics and researched on each using Google. StackExchange has some amazing answers that helped me a lot.

Free part of Scala for the Impatient: http://fileadmin.cs.lth.se/scala/scala-impatient.pdf

Re: Scala School

#8

Post by Zaheer »

My biggest problem with Scala is that it's too powerful. Reading code I've written weeks or even days later is painful. Conciseness is not always good.

Re: Scala School

#9

Post by chuwy »

pcx wrote: post #7

Learning Scala is such a pain. Either you follow a large book completely and master it across several months/years or go through overly complicated online guides and get discouraged. I understand it's a large, advanced language, but the community has to seriously work on making things a bit easier for beginners like me. Just look at how easy it is to learn Go or Rust, their official tutorials are amazing and free on…

I agree about painful learning curve for Scala. Problem I think in very divergent community and in different approaches for a every single problem (unlike for example Python or Go): OOP vs FP, Typesafe vs Typelevel, scalaz vs cats, Cake Pattern vs sanity.

There's a also a problem that most powerful Scala techniques are there "by accident" [1] and unlikely will (or should) appear in official guides.

Also I disagree that "Scala for impatient" is good book for start. It make me feel Scala is dump of random unrelated features, it's very easy to disappoint.

However, despite all above I think Scala is definitely worth to invest some time. It made all other learning curves (for languages, techniques, concepts) more flatten.

[1] https://meta.plasm.us/posts/2015/07/11/roll-your-own-scala/

Re: Scala School

#10

Post by joshlemer »

Zaheer wrote: post #8

My biggest problem with Scala is that it's too powerful. Reading code I've written weeks or even days later is painful. Conciseness is not always good.

In what ways does Scala you've written end up being unreadable just days later? I honestly find that Scala code is some of the simplest and easiest to reason about of any language. Writing Scala has honestly been such a joy, it's easy to refactor, easy to read and write, and I almost never miss something -- if it compiles, Scala code is usually correct I find.
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