Today I took a first glance at Scala at the Paris JUG monthly meeting. Scala is a programming language which runs on the Java Virtual Machine.
I have not compiled a single line of code in Scala yet but I saw enough code to get a decent idea of it.
When you think Scala, think about the functional programming paradigme. A function can be a value.
The first speaker, Sader Drobi, showed us a few examples of code to illustrate the advantages of passing a function as a parameter.
object FirstTest {
def myfunction(callback: () => Unit) {
callback();
}
def otherfunction() {
println("Hello")
}
def main(args: Array[String]) {
myfunction(otherfunction)
}
}
In this example, the function myfunction takes a function (anotherfunction) as a parameter. It prints hello.
And then Romain Maton and Nicolas Jozwiak, from Xebia, gave us a good presentation of the language (history, Martin Odersky, frameworks, functional programming, actors, traits, IDE plugins …). Apparently a trait in Scala can be seen as a Java interface in which one can define methods. I liked their example based on the Visitor pattern.
Everything is an object in Scala.
A few links to begin with :
http://www.artima.com/scalazine
http://www.codecommit.com/blog
http://groups.google.com/group/paris-scala-user-group
http://thecodersbreakfast.net/index.php?post/2010/04/11/Paris-JUG-Scala
I look forward to taking the time to learn more about this language and start coding with it.
Juscala ça va 😉
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