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Does the course cover Functors, Applicatives, Monoids, and Monads? What about other higher-level functional constructs (Arrows, Zippers...)? From what I've seen, I think Scala is a nice language. One thing I don't like is particularly that it's a bit kitchen-sink-ish: there's a whole lot of syntax and semantics to learn, seemingly due to the OO side of the language. By comparison Haskell is quite simple. All the higher-level constructs are implemented in plain Haskell, so you can easily understand them but thanks to a flexible, uniform syntax, using them doesn't feel clunky. To me the main reason for not learning FP through Scala, however, is that the community isn't organized around teaching FP in the same way that Haskell is. It sounds like this course is an exception. But otherwise, I found that trying to learn about Monads from the scalaz documentation was not satisfying, and we all know that "A Monad is a Sheep with Curly Hair" blog posts are a dime a dozen (in Haskell and Scala). Learn You a Haskell made the concepts, and also their benefits, clear to me for the first time. Now I'm working through Real World Haskell to build my chops and reinforce my understanding. While trying out both languages and picking which one to learn, I came across an interesting post on Gilad Bracha's blog which had a lively discussion including a comment by the [claimed] original author of Scalaz [1], which made it clear to me that it would be easier to start in Haskell and move to Scala than vice versa. I think I (and the OP) are both seeking to gain a strong foundation in FP concepts. To summarize, in my experience most Scala resources on the internet (blog posts that come up, etc.) aren't quite as good in this regard; at this point a lot of the Scala programmers using these techniques are probably Haskell programmers anyway. That being said, the internet is a huge place. If there's a Scala equivalent of this post [2] please do share it! I agree with other posters here that Scala has quickly gained a significant amount of industrial acceptance. I'd imagine that I'm more likely to write Scala professionally in my lifetime than Haskell. But I also believe I'll be better off approaching it having learned the FP concepts in Haskell first. [1] http://gbracha.blogspot.com/2011/01/maybe-monads-might-not-m... [2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1012573/getting-started-w... |
Nope. It's very intro level, though the students basically begged Odersky for a part II, and he seemed very open to it.
And I totally didn't mean to imply that I thought people should learn Scala instead of Haskell. I was just sharing a FP resource I found helpful.
Not actually having mastered the higher level functional constructs yet myself, I really don't have a firm opinion about which is the "better" approach. Personally, I've looked at both languages and I know that each helped me understand the other. So if I have any opinion, it's that if you get stuck, it's probably a good idea to approach it from another angle, like the author is doing.