Blogs

Tags > scala

R as a programming language

Garrett Grolemund is an O’Reilly author and teaches classes on data analysis for R Studios. We sat down to discuss why data scientists, statisticians, and programmers alike can use the R language to make data analysis easier and more powerful. …

Four short links: 3 April 2013

Capn Proto — open source faster protocol buffers (binary data interchange format and RPC system). Saddle — a high performance data manipulation library for Sacala. Vega — a visualization grammar, a declarative format for creating, saving and sharing visualization designs. …

Tools for test-driven development in Scala

Scala, a language designed for well-structured and readable programs, is richly provisioned with testing frameworks. The community has adopted test-driven development (TDD) and behavior-driven development (BDD) with zeal. These represent the baseline for trustworthy code development today. TDD and BDD …

Why use Scala

Alex Payne, co-author of the "Programming Scala," talks about the advantages of using Scala.

Editorial Radar: Functional languages

O'Reilly editors Mike Loukides and Mike Hendrickson discuss the advantages of functional programming languages and how functional language techniques can be deployed with almost any language.

Four short links: 12 July 2011

Slopegraphs -- a nifty Tufte visualization which conveys rank, value, and delta over time. Includes pointers to how to make them, and guidelines for when and how they work. (via Avi Bryant) Ask Me Anything: A Technical Lead on the Google+ Team -- lots of juicy details about technology and dev process. A couple nifty tricks we do: we...

A rough guide to JVM languages

This overview of JVM-based programming compares the relative strengths of the major languages.

Four short links: 22 June 2011

DOM Snitch -- an experimental Chrome extension that enables developers and testers to identify insecure practices commonly found in client-side code. See also the introductory post. (via Hacker News) Spark -- Hadoop-alike in Scala. Spark was initially developed for two applications where keeping data in memory helps: iterative algorithms, which are common in machine learning, and interactive data mining....

Four short links: 18 January 2011

How Facebook Ships Code -- all engineers go through 4 to 6 week "Boot Camp" training where they learn the Facebook system by fixing bugs and listening to lectures given by more senior/tenured engineers. estimate 10% of each boot camp's trainee class don't make it and are counseled out of the organization. Reminded me of Zappos paying people to...

Developer Year in Review: Programming Languages

This year brought confusion and chaos in the Java space, continued growth for functional languages due to the attack of multicore, and the usual popularity for all of the dynamic languages we know and love.

Four short links: 22 December 2010

ietherpad -- continuation of the etherpad startup. Offers pro accounts, and promise an iPad app to come. (via Steve O'Grady on Twitter) Scala Collections Quickref -- quick reference card for the Scala collections classes. (via Ian Kallen on Twitter) Raw Data and the Rise of Little Brother -- Turns out, despite the great push for citizen journalism, citizens are...

Vale Java? Scala Vala palava - and Go too

Dave Megginson (who drove the development of the SAX API that will be familiar to many XML developers who use Java) recently wrote Java is dead. Java stood out as a programming language (though not as a platform) in that...

Four short links: 25 May 2010

Lending Merry-Go-Round -- these guys have been Australia's sharpest satire for years, filling the role of the Daily Show. Here they ask some strong questions about the state of Europe's economies ... (via jdub on Twitter) What's Powering the Guardian's Content API -- Scala and Solr/Lucene on EC2 is the short answer. The long answer reveals the details of...

The XML Character Encoding Detection Routine in Different Programming Languages

The XML encoding detection routine is a nice single page size for comparing programming language capabilities related to simple scanning. Here are a few. Scala Python Java C++ search function definition for xmlSwitchInputEncodingInt PHP...

Software patterns as a symptom of failure? - If you have to use them, maybe your programming language is just not powerful enough?

The most interesting comment I have read recently about the pattern language movement is the comment that Gang of Four style software patterns are only necessary when the programming system does not have adequate power or capabilities to directly state the pattern.

Vale JCP? - Scala and Java:

From ERH's Cafe au Lait: So apparently Sun has decided to add closures to Java 7. They will, of course, not remove anything to make room, so Java just gets bigger and bulkier. They will also give us a half-hearted...