"functional languages" entries

3 simple reasons why you need to learn Scala

How Scala will help you grow as a Java developer.

Editor’s Note: If you’re a Java developer these days, one who is fully entrenched within the Java SE or Java EE development environment, you’ve grown accustomed to waiting for new features and updates. Change happens at the speed of dial-up, which is a blessing for legacy code, servers, and software infrastructure that thrive on maintaining profitable grace through clunky predictability. You may have even dabbled with a JVM language, such as Scala or Clojure, thinking you could do more with less code — and you can — but then you’ve realized the barrier to entry is steep compared with the needs of meeting day-to-day responsibilities. Why learn something new, you’ve thought, when there’s no strong incentive to change?

With Scala Days nearly upon us, the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco will be awash with developers excited to share ideas and explore the latest use-cases in this “best of both worlds” language. Scala has come a long way from its humble origins at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, but with the fusion of functional and object-oriented programming continuing to pick up steam across leading-edge enterprises and start-ups, there’s no better time than right now to stop dabbling with code snippets and begin mastering the basics. Here are three simple reasons why learning Scala will help you grow as a Java developer, as excerpted from Jason Swartz’s new book Learning Scala.

1. Your code will be better

You will be able to start using functional programming techniques to stabilize your applications and reduce issues that arise from unintended side effects. By switching from mutable data structures to immutable data structures and from regular methods to pure functions that have no effect on their environment, your code will be safer, more stable, and much easier to comprehend.
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Emerging languages spotlight: Elm

Evan Czaplicki on breaking the HTML-CSS-JavaScript blockade with functional reactive programming.

Over the next few months I’ll be taking a look at new and emerging programming languages. The following piece is the first in this series.


The Elm Programming Language, created by Evan Czaplicki, tackles web interaction and takes on the big three — HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Czaplicki to talk about why he decided to take on this daunting project and how Elm could revolutionize web programming.

Czaplicki was working on a front-end web project and he was thinking about how is it that web development can be “so frustrating in a way it didn’t have to be.” That was the day Elm was born (he talks about that moment in this segment of our video interview).

Today’s websites bear virtually no resemblance to those from 10 years ago, so why are we using the same tools? Cyclical upgrades to HTML, CSS and JavaScript have certainly enhanced and improved upon older versions. HTML5 has taken some great leaps forward. But we’re still using the core.

Coming from a functional programming background led Czaplicki to think about web programming from the perspective of functional reactive programming. What is functional reactive programming? It takes away the idea that interaction between a website and user is static — updating only at certain moments or clicks — and inserts the capability to update as events happen, like mouse movements. Czaplicki gives more detailed insight here. Read more…

Top Stories: April 30-May 4, 2012

An open standards battle in the U.K., mobile web development keeps growing, the upside of functional languages.

This week on O'Reilly: We learned how the U.K. government is facing pressure from all sides as it evaluates open standards, Maximiliano Firtman evaluated two years' worth of mobile web developments, and the utility of functional languages was put in the spotlight.