The Seductions of Scala

Functional Programming in Scala (and Why You Should Care)

• A brief overview of why functional programming matters (15 mins)
  • FP is a more robust approach to concurrency than “imperative” approaches.
  • FP code tends to be more succinct than procedural code, which improves our productivity in several ways.
  • Because of its mathematical roots, FP encourages more “provable-correct” code.

• How Scala supports functional programming (60 mins)
  • Scala’s type system helps us “bake out” bugs, which complements our tests.
  • Scala supports all the common functional idioms that support the qualities described in the FP overview (we’ll cover Concurrent later).

Better Objects with Traits

• Traits as a mechanism for component and application composition. (45 mins)
  • Scala fixes the the limitations of Java object model, using traits.
  • Traits promote abstraction and composition of focused, reusable features.
  • Traits provide a mechanism for wiring components into applications, similar to dependency injection, but with several advantages.
  • Despite apparent surface contradictions, Scala integrates functional and object-oriented programming in an elegant way.

A Look at Concurrency

• Scala’s Actor Library (45 mins)
  • Scala’s standard Actor library implements the Actor model of concurrency, where autonomous agents coordinate their work through message passing.
  • A detailed example demonstrates how Actors work and also demonstrates examples of combining object-oriented and functional techniques most effectively in Scala.

Q & A (15 mins)