There are a great many benefits to be learning something like Scala, when you have an educational background like I do. Even small snippets of text can flesh out whole expanses of a conceptual landscape, and not just a Scala-one.
Today it is the following lines from Cay Horstmann’s Scala for the Impatient:
“Scala has functions in addition to methods. A method operates on an object, but a function doesn’t. C++ has functions as well, but in Java you imitate them with static methods”
from Scala for the Impatient by Cay Horstmann, pp 21
I’ve been here before, but in the mass of words I copied from Wikipedia at that point, this simple distinction was lost on me (it’s there, but implicitly). It’s an important distinction too – a method has an object, a function doesn’t - and another fine conceptual tool which, added to my armoury of subtle distinctions and concepts, should help me get further under the skin of both Scala and other languages.
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