Skip to main content

Course completed

As I wrote in previous posts I've been attending a course Functional Programming Principles in Scala on coursera. I've completed the course and will write my final thoughts of the course this time.

First weeks


The first three weeks was like a  boot camp to drop out everyone who's not fully commited to the course. I've written about the first weeks in a previous post so I'm not going to repeat myself.

Weeks four and five


Weeks four and five were a positive surprise in two different ways. First of all the subjects were much more interesting and practical than in previous weeks. The second nice surprise was that the homework for the two weeks was combined.

Week four was about pattern matching which is a essential part of Scala and I found it to be a very interesting concept, easy to understand and it can simplify the code.

Week five was about lists. Nothing shocking during the week as lists are similar to lists in Java but in Scala lists do have some operations that come from the world of functional programming that Java doesn't have. This week also introduced a new concept called tuples which is something I'd love to have also in other programming languages.

The last two weeks


Week six was about collections other than lists including maps, ranges, sets and vectors. This week also introduced Scala's for queries which can be very different looking than in OOP. The collections are very similar to ones in Java so nothing new there but interesting new operations to transform between maps and other collections.

Week seven the last week introduced streams and lazy evaluation where in both the value is evaluated when it's needed. Lazy evaluation can be applied to any type of value or function so it's not evaluated until it's needed. Streams are similar to lists where the first element has a value and the rest of the elements aren't evaluated until needed.

Final thoughts


First weeks was a real pain like a boot camp to drop off the students who aren't motivated enough. The middle of the course consisted on familiar concepts from OOP and introduced some functional properties of them. The end of the course put all the learned concepts in use and introduced some functional concepts that are not found in OOP.

In the end I did learn some Scala but even more I learned about functional programming and what it means compared to OOP. This course gave me more than I could ever learn by reading from books or by practicing by myself.

Now that I've completed the course I'm taking a break from studying and after a few weeks of taking it easy I'll be trying out my new skill set with Scala to get some more practice. 

Popular posts from this blog

Simple code: Naming things

There are two hard things in programming and naming is one them. If you don't believe me ask Martin Fowler https://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/TwoHardThings.html . In this post I'll be covering some general conventions for naming things to improve readability and understandabilty of the code. There are lots of things that need a name in programming. Starting from higher abstractions to lower we need to name a project, API or library, we probably need to name the source code repository, when we get to the code we need to name our modules or packages, we give names to classes, objects, interfaces and in those we name our functions or methods and within those we name our variables. Overall a lot of things to name. TLDR; Basic rule There's a single basic convention to follow to achiveve better, more descriptive naming of things. Give it a meaningful name i.e. don't use shorthands like gen or single letter variables like a, x, z instead tell what it represents, what it does...

Simple code extra: Readability examples

Seven ways to write the same code snippet  Here are eight ways to write the exactly same code. Some are easier to read than others and all are a variation of a code I've seen in a real code base. My personal favorite is #7, what's yours?  #1 One liner DAO.filter { it.name == "foo" }.map { it.company }.toSet() #2 two lines, three operations DAO.filter { it.name == "foo" }   .map { it.company }.toSet() #3 Evaluation on it's own line DAO.filter {   it.name == "foo" }.map { it.company }.toSet() #4 Each operation and evaluation on their own lines DAO.filter {   it.name == "foo" }.map { it.company } .toSet() #5 All function calls and evaluation on their own lines DAO   .filter {     it.name == "foo"   }.map { it.company }   .toSet() #6 Everything on it's own line DAO   .filter {     it.name == "foo"   }   .map { it.company }   .toSet() #7 All function calls on their own lines DAO   .filter {  i...

Simple code: Version control commits

Currently the most popular version control system is git and I'll be writing this based on git and it's functionalities and capabilities. Git is often seen as a way to enable distributed programming i.e. multiple programmers can work on the same code repository quite easily without disturbing each others work (much). In addition to that just like other VCS's it's also a log of work but to my experience that part is often unfortunately neglected. What I will be focusing this time is the log part because I think it deserves more attention. Why to create a meaningful log? The git log should consist from small meaningful changesets where each commit addresses a single problem. By dividing the log to small commits it enables resilient way of working. Being resilient enables simple and fast procedures to rollbacks, reviews, tags, branching etc. Lets say that a developer is implementing a REST API. The API needs a web layer that receives the HTTP requests, it probably has some...