scala

This is the 3rd post in the Scala vs. Kotlin focus series. This week, I’d like to address two features: inline and infix - not because they’re related but because neither of them would be enough to fill a post. Inlining comes from C (and then C++). In those languages, a hint could be provided to the compiler through the inline keyword. By doing so, it may replace an inlined function call by the function body itself in order to skip the overhead of a function call.

This is the 1st post in the Scala vs. Kotlin focus series. I’ve been introduced to the world of immutable data structures with the Scala programming language - to write I’ve been introduced to the Functional Programming world would sound too presumptuous.

I play Role-Playing since I’m eleven, and me and my posse still play once or twice a year. Recently, they decided to play Earthdawn again, a game we didn’t play since more than 15 years! That triggered my desire to create an application to roll all those strangely-shaped dice. And to combine the useful with the pleasant, I decided to use technologies I’m not really familiar with: the Scala language, the Android platform and the Gradle build system.

The Builder pattern has been described in the Gang of Four Design Patterns book: The builder pattern is a design pattern that allows for the step-by-step creation of complex objects using the correct sequence of actions. The construction is controlled by a director object that only needs to know the type of object it is to create.

Java is too verbose! Who didn’t stumble on such a rant on the Internet previously? And the guy bragging about [Insert expressive language there], that which soon replace Java because it is much more concise: it can replace those 10 lines of Java code with a one-liner. Ah, the power! Unfortunately, in order to correlate conciseness with power (and verbosity with lack of power), those people take many shortcuts that once put into perspective make no sense at all.

This is a a sum-up of talks I attended on the second day of Devoxx France. It includes Scala, GWT, a comparison of web frameworks and not-mainstream data structures.

As a follow-up of point 4 of my previous article, here’s a first little cheatsheet on the Scala collections API. As in Java, knowing API is a big step in creating code that is more relevant, productive and maintainable. Collections play such an important part in Scala that knowing the collections API is a big step toward better Scala knowledge.

This week saw another flame war from some of the Scala crowd. This time, it was toward Stephen Colebourne, the man behind Joda time. To be frank, I tend to agree to Stephen’s predicat but for very different reasons. Now, if you’re a Scala user, there are basically 2 options.

My article from last week left me mildly depressed: my efforts trying to ease my Vaadin development was brutally stopped when I couldn’t inherit from a Java inner class in Scala. I wondered if it was an impossibility or mere lack of knowledge on my part. Fortunately, Robert Lally and Dale gave me the solution in their comments (many thanks to them). The operator used to access an inner class from Java in Scala is #.

People who are familiar with my articles know that I’m interested in Vaadin and also more recently in Scala since both can increase your productivity. Thus it is only natural that I tried to embed the best of both worlds, so to speak, as an experience. As an added challenge, I also tried to add Maven to the mix. It wasn’t as successful as I had wished, but the conclusions are interesting.