Month: July 2013

  • Scala Wonderland: Semicolons, singletons and companion objects

    In Scala you may usually omit semicolon at the end of a statement. It is required if more statements are on a single line. Unfortunately there are cases when compiler doesn’t undrstand the code as you would expect. For example following is treated as two statements a and +b: a + b Solution is to…

  • Scala Wonderland: Lists

    In functional style methods should not have side effects. A consequence of this philosophy is that List is immutable in Scala. Construction of a List is simple. val abc = List(“a”, “b”, “c”) There is one trick in the previous code. A common trick in Scala. It invokes method named apply on List companion object.…

  • The Rule of Failed Integration Build

    What to do if an integration build fails? By failing I mean either there is a compilation error or an automated test fails. The general rule in most of the teams that I worked with is that this situation should be treated with the highest priority. The developer who has caused this problem is responsible…

  • Scala Wonderland: The functional style

    Scala encourages to use a functional style of programming. For programmers coming from imperative world of Java or C# it is the main challenge. The first step is to recognize the difference between functional and imperative programming. Scala has two keywords for variable declaration: var – mutable variables val – immutable variables One sign of…

  • Scala Wonderland #1: All operations are method calls

    I’ve started learning Scala two months ago and I can’t get back to Murakami’s 1Q84 so exciting it is. In the coming series I’d like to share my excitement with you. It won’t be yet another step-by-step tutorial. I’ll share features that made me think (IBM should be proud of me). For whatever reason. val…