Fp and scala
- 1. Introduction to Functional Programming & Scala Pros and Cons - Vikram Kadi
- 2. What is Functional Programming Including but not limited to using Functions as first class objects Passing around functions just as we do do data in the code Constructing higher order functions that can be composed from basic functions Immutability Functions do not modify the arguments, instead they return newer state of arguments
- 3. Recursion Instead of loops, computations are viewed as operating on a sequence of inputs Pattern Matching Switch style pattern matching Lambda functions Anonymous functions that are created on the fly Introduced in Java 8 DSL Ability to construct Domain specific languages
- 4. Pros Multi-core processors Increasing cores instead of clock rates Side effect free code can be run on multiple cores in parallel Due to immutability, code written with a functional paradigm tends to align itself in small methods, this lends itself well to modular design Concise modular code is much easier to test and mock
- 5. Cons Learning curve might be steep at times Does not completely eliminate mutable state, but does a good job of isolating it
- 6. Scala Introduced in 2003, aimed at overcoming various issues of Java language Syntax feels like a mix of Java + Python + Erlang Pure OOP No primitive types Operators are method calls on objects Functions are also objects Greatly reduces the verbosity of code JVM based, interoperable with existing java code/libraries
- 7. Akka Actor based concurrency model Actors are concurrent running processes Do not share any shared state Communicate with each other via message passing Library built for both Scala and Java APIs Supervision trees and monitoring of actors built in to the framework, with configurable restarts and error handling
- 8. Getting Started Install brew, if you haven’t already brew install scala && brew install sbt sbt (simple build tool) is based on apache ivy, but works with maven to pull in dependent java/scala libraries Use scala REPL to try out small language features without having to worry about creating source directories and setting up projects Read Scala for the impatient, this book has good reviews
- 9. Discuss