Some interesting posts lately

[Aaron]

Hi fellas!

It's about time I reckon we actually do something with this group. I'm
not sure what yet, but I hope to join up with Agile Yorkshire (http://
www.agileyorkshire.org/) to see if any of those fellers have any
interest in Scala.

Anyway, in the meantime, there have been some interesting posts
recently from the server-side and elsewhere. Some which have caught my
eye. These two sum up some of my feelings in comparing Java with
Scala:


Scala == Effective Java ?
http://grahamhackingscala.blogspot.com/2011/01/does-scala-equal-effective-java-bloch.html

How Scala changed the way I think about my Java Code
http://www.javacodegeeks.com/2011/08/how-scala-changed-way-i-think-about-my.html


I've also found these to be helpful reads after struggling with
several different blog posts about monads and various parts of Haskell
(Functors, ApplicativeFunctors and Monads)

http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2007/10/monads-are-elephants-part-3.html

http://gabrielsw.blogspot.com/2011/08/functors-applicative-functors-and.html

Have fun!

[Aaron]

I should also have included this article discussing (generally) the
merits of IoC in Scala.

http://moreindirection.blogspot.com/2011/08/implicit-environment-pattern.html?m=1

It could perhaps be another topic of discussion - I know there are a
lot of Spring fans. I take the point about bulky 3rd party libs,
programming in XML, and can see that declaring an implicit
'environment' could be useful; It declares a dependency on other
systems in your method/class signature, but making it implicit makes
it feel natural. I'd like to try it with logging... often we forgive
service lookup/singleton pattern with loggers, but if the logger is
part of your environment, then it may be a less intrusive way to test/
assert some internals from unit tests without having to change your
production code (I've seen some people cringe at relaxing a private
helper method to package scope to make it testable).

Anyway, just a bit of thought food.