Steven Levine
Steven Levine
3 min read

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Lately it seems like functional programming has been the talk of the town, the new (old) paradigm that is making a comeback in a major way. For a while, I resisted the urge to follow the paradigm de jour, being the hard core OO guy that I am, but now it is clear to me that it is more than just hype. There are many reasons functional programming makes sense as a paradigm for developing software today, but the one that I am most interested in is the fact that it handles concurrency so well, thus providing us the building blocks to develop extremely scalable applications.

FP(Functional Programming) has been on my mind for a while. The seed was placed there in late 2007 by the Java Posse listening to their interview with Martin Odersky. They were not talking about FP per se, but more about a specific JVM language called Scala (pronounced skah-lah not scale-la). Scala is not a pure functional language, it is actually a fusion between functional and object oriented programming. It brings together the best of both worlds. My exposure to Scala did not end there, as I got another huge dose at Java One 2008. Two of my favorite sessions there were either on Scala, or Scala was a major discussion point.

The first session was the Script Bowl. This session was not specifically about Scala, it was more of a JVM scripting language battle, and in the end JRuby was crowned king by the audience. In my mind, Scala was the clear winner, because of the simple, yet elegant and powerfull concurrency demonstrated. The presenter wrote what looked like a relatively simple program, and it was capable of indexing tons of RSS feed dumps in real time on a typical multi-core laptop computer. I remember thinking to my self, wow, it would take me a lot more time and effort to write a similar program in Java, and it probably wouldn’t have the same level of scalability as the one demonstrated. The Scala code was able to fully utilize the multi-core processors it was running on.

The second session was on Scala presented by the father of Scala him self Martin Odersky. During that session I was wowed again with some of Scala’s features like it:

  • is scalable because it works for very small and very large systems.
  • “is the Java programming language of the future.”
  • is object oriented, functional, and a scripting language.
  • leverages Actor’s as the primary concurrency construct.
  • fits seamlessly in to a Java environment.
  • is a composition language, as it adds the notion of Traits.
  • has an updated type system supporting type inference.

After those two sessions, I headed over to the Java One bookstore to check out the Beta version of Programming in Scala. I was impressed, but couldn’t help thinking, is Scala for me? Can I use it at work? Is it viable in the enterprise?

Fast forward 7 months to today, and let me answer my own questions with one word: yes!

  • Is it for me? Yes, because Scala is not only something new, it is something advanced, because it was written in a no compromise academic environment. If nothing else it is a great way to broaden my horizons as a programmer.
  • Can I use this at work? Yes, Scala code compiles down to Java byte code, so theoretically, if I was very evil, I could write all my code at work in Scala, run Scalac on it, and add the class files to the application, and no one would be any the wiser. Will I do that? No way, I am simply trying to illustrate a point that Scala is totally compatible with any existing Java environment.
  • Is it viable in the enterprise? Yes, with its advanced concurrency model, I can only imagine the type of throughput you can achieve. (Looking forward to finding out)

Now you know where my interest in Scala comes from. Hopefully after reading this post, you will be a bit curious about it as well.