But thanks to its kitchen sink attitude, it's not an easy language to come to grips with for someone with an aging memory and a less than full-time commitment.
Perhaps this is one of the things that is tripping people up that I'm not doing. I tend to still be quite verbose in my code, even if only as a way of reminding myself what I thought the code was supposed to do (ever look back at Python and you're not really sure whether the variable is supposed to be a list or a tuple or a string? I have that problem all the time). I don't tend to use all the flourishes like underscores and such.
It seems a bit like Perl's many ways to do it attitude. Except I feel like Perl was designed by ideology, whereas Scala has a lot of bits and pieces because it wasn't clear to Odersky et al. which bits people would like and which they wouldn't. Perhaps rather than trying to enforce an idomatic style, they wanted programmers to find their own way. But that means there's things in the language that exist and can't be taken out (XML literals), and there's no documentation cohesion (by which I mean different documents will tell you to do different things, and you're not sure which is best).
If you Google "effective scala", you'll see a number of people clamoring for a book along the lines of Effective Java, and Scala sorely needs it, but Scala is still too much of a moving target to warrant putting anything in dead tree form yet. The Davetron Scala Style guide, however, is a really good stop gap, and helped me a lot.
Perhaps this is one of the things that is tripping people up that I'm not doing. I tend to still be quite verbose in my code, even if only as a way of reminding myself what I thought the code was supposed to do (ever look back at Python and you're not really sure whether the variable is supposed to be a list or a tuple or a string? I have that problem all the time). I don't tend to use all the flourishes like underscores and such.
It seems a bit like Perl's many ways to do it attitude. Except I feel like Perl was designed by ideology, whereas Scala has a lot of bits and pieces because it wasn't clear to Odersky et al. which bits people would like and which they wouldn't. Perhaps rather than trying to enforce an idomatic style, they wanted programmers to find their own way. But that means there's things in the language that exist and can't be taken out (XML literals), and there's no documentation cohesion (by which I mean different documents will tell you to do different things, and you're not sure which is best).
If you Google "effective scala", you'll see a number of people clamoring for a book along the lines of Effective Java, and Scala sorely needs it, but Scala is still too much of a moving target to warrant putting anything in dead tree form yet. The Davetron Scala Style guide, however, is a really good stop gap, and helped me a lot.