Above, Below, and Beyond Tech Talk

by Rahel Lüthy

September 28, 2012

Scala Gems #5: FP @ Coursera

Along with more than 40k others, I am in the second week of Odersky’s free online course titled “Functional Programming Principles in Scala”. The video lectures are really well structured and very entertaining – it’s great to learn from the master himself. Given that the course only requires 1 year of programming background, the assignments are not too complex yet, but I have no doubt that things will get trickier soon!

Afaik, it’s still not too late to register, and it’s FREE: http://www.coursera.org/course/progfun

Regarding tool setup: Don’t even download the Eclipse-based Scala IDE, it sucks big time. How can these people get anything done with a piece of crap that crashes every few minutes, even with just a 2-file project?! Luckily, the assignments can as well be completed with IntelliJ IDEA, with the community edition Scala plugin.

To end this post with some code, this is how the first exercise looks like:

def pascal(c: Int, r: Int): Int = ???

The cool thing is that this code compiles – Scala method naming FTW!