(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.