Learning Scala from a Java perspective

I’ve been reading up and keeping abreast of both the .NET world and Java world this year, both have some mighty exciting advancements coming – teaser: its all about the Pentiums! I’ll try and cover some of my research into parallel work later.

One of the other areas I’ve been keen on (after hearing from the leader of our pack, Mr Wolfe) was Scala and came across a incredibly useful resource by Daniel Spiewak on looking at Scala from a Java developers perspective.

The linked article is a ’roundup’ of the many posts he’s done on the topic and covers the many facets of Scala and gives it in a Java developers perspective. Highly recommended reading if your just starting out in understanding Scala and functional programming general. I have to admit, Scala is growing on me.

F# is the key functional programming language in .NET and whilst I’ve seen them being compared quite frequently, I feel they target to different areas. From a n00bish-functional-programming perspective, it feels like Scala is all about the OO and F# is more about writing in a functional perspective. But here’s an article from 2007 that may give you a better idea or Brandon Werner‘s article comparing the functional languages.

By the same token, there’s a great introduction to F# that will cover the historical and core language.

I remember messing about 10 years ago with Delphi, VB, Java, C/C++ and thinking this is RAD, but the world seems to be morphing into the functional programming paradigm now. What better time to start musing with it?