Wednesday 20 November 2013

(Many) Legibility Wins and (a few) Losses (Part 2 in an Occasional Series)

I posted before about some of the things in Scala which I think help and hinder legibility – all from my personal perspective of course.  We’ll here’s the next instalment:

Wins

  • yield
  • Any” type, and its immediate syb-types
  • Pattern matching with types
  • Pattern matching with tuples
  • rockets (<= and =>) – so far at least…
  • (new Duck).myMethod – to keep the scope of the Duck instance as tight as possible
  • traits – I’ve always liked mixins anyway, but nothing is broken from what I liked in Ruby
  • the terse syntax (sans curly braces etc.) for defining classes when you don’t need it – e.g. “class MyClass
  • val c = new MyObject with MyTrait – when you don’t need to reuse the class definition elsewhere
  • sealed – does what it says on the tin
  • zip – ditto
  • take – ditto
  • + – adding a new key-value pair to an existing map. Gives you a new map back
  • catches and pattern matching
  • try blocks being expressions
  • exceptions being only for exceptional circumstances – a nice idiom

Losses

  • explicit setter definition (_=) - :$
  • set unions with ‘|
  • set differences with ‘&~’ or ‘--

Undecided

  • no parens for methods which have no side effects – sometimes, when these are abstract, they make you double-take a little

Overall, things are getting less and less surprising and more and more #winning.  Perhaps my resistance is being worn down. Perhaps I’m just more open to the experience.  Or perhaps all this is taking hold. One thing I do know however is that some of the method names on the collections classes are just plain wrong, but I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that.

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