Tag Archives: scala

Why Scala? (2) Compact syntax applied to probabilistic actions

As a little fun project, I developed some probabilistic cellular automata with Scala and very basic AWT graphics. I continue to become more proficient with Scala, and it feels increasingly natural to use. During this exercise I came up with something that I thought was particularly elegant, and that I am pretty sure would have […]

Meta notes: 1+ year with Monomorphic blogging

After 13 months and 51 posts, my experiments in blogging continue, although they are perhaps better described as polymorphic than monomorphic. Maybe it’s time for some reflections. On the whole blogging in this format and at this frequency has been a pretty fun and fulfilling process. I get to practice writing free-form, nonscientific texts, and […]

Why Scala? The mixing of imperative and functional style

Scala is a little wonderland sprinkled with useful things you can mix and match as you like to improve your coding experience while staying on the Java platform. The Option classes, the structural case matching, the compact declarations, lazy evaluation… the list goes on. But at the heart of it is the decision to mix […]

An immutable MultiMap for Scala

The Scala collections library (in version 2.7.7) has a MultiMap trait for mutable collections, but none for immutable ones. I hacked something up to use while waiting for an official version. I’m finding this to work well, but I don’t have much experience with collections design, so it’s likely to have some flaws. Also, this […]

Where is Java going?

Today, Java is one of the most popular programming languages. Introduced in 1995, it rests on a tripod of the language itself, its libraries, and the JVM. In the TIOBE programming language league charts, it has been at the top for as long as the measurements have been made (since 2002), overtaken by C only […]