Even More Legibility Wins (and no Losses) (Part 3 in a Occasional Series): Special “Option” Edition

I posted twice before about some of the things in Scala which I think help and hinder legibility – all from my personal perspective of course.  Well, here’s the third instalment.  It’s dedicated to the Option.  #winning:

Wins

• Option types
  • just the concept in general – I think it’ll be a long time before I fully grok how great these really are
  • not to mention they’re biased (c.f. Atomic Scala, Atom: “Handling Non-Values with Option”, pp 352)
  • but also their being handled seamlessly in for comprehensions
  • as well as their having foreach and map functions on them
  • and the Option names: Some and None
• null (even from Java code) being wrapped as a None

Losses

• None – not that I can think of anyway…

Undecided

• The name “Option” – Bruce and Dianne aren’t convinced. I don’t hate it. (c.f. Atomic Scala, Atom: “Handling Non-Values with Option”, pp 355)

Post-script

Excitingly, the same idiomatic concept makes it into the Scala equivalent of Java’s try/catch: Try(…) which produces either a Success or a Failure.  Far more on that to come in the next post (and much more), this time from a special guest: Colorado-resident, CodingFrog.