Hello again! Nice to see you decided to come back. If you check my previous post you know that functions are quite an important matter in the Scala language.

Last time, talking about recursion, I wasn't able to cover all the topics about functions. So I decided to dedicate yet another post to it. You can call it "advanced functions", but I don't think is so "advance" what I'm going to show here.

You are welcome to read some more on functions in this new blog post.

Welcome to another post on my series of tutorials. As you can see (if you were following my tutorials since I started them), I change the environment of my blog, using Octopress to facilitate the blog writing (it has very nice features such as the automatic categories and blog archive).

This time we will exploring one of the most powerful things Scala offers as a functional programming language. That is, of course, the functions, the core concept in this paradigm.

This concept is quite important, and I'm sure I won't be able to explain the full potential of Scala functions as I'm not a master in functional programming paradigm. Yet, I'll do my best. However, it is important that you take a tutorial or course on Scala's functional programming (I deeply recommend Martin Odersky's Functional Programming Principles in Scala).

Ok, after a short period of laziness, I come back for more. I warned you about my activity, but, to be fair, it's been a busy couple of weeks at work.

However, before starting, I wanted you to know that there is an upcoming Course for Functional Programming Principles in Scala in 25 days (starts on September 15th). You can find more information about it (or even enroll in it) at Coursera. The course is in charge of Martin Odersky, the creator of Scala, so you are in good hands.

So, back to business. On this session let's talk about some more real programming.

So, on this entry I'll put a halt on the series of tutorials I've been writing. Instead I think it's time to give a personal opinion in why did I choose Scala as my new main language.

Before keep going on this, I'll just state that this is a complete personal opinion on Scala, is completely subjective. The reason why I chose it is mine and doesn't have to be your reason to choose it, but maybe you'll find some useful insights on what advantages I think the language has.

So, a couple of friends and co-workers asked me "Why Scala over Python? (or any other language for that matter)", I guess I've never answered with a full justification on why did I do it. Actually, I don't think I have a real or valid justification more than "because I liked it", but I do want to state some stuff that end up with me switching from a Python programmer to a Scala programmer.

So, now you've learnt about Scala lists. As you could see in the previous examples, Scala has a very functional kind of lists, as these are immutable.

If you are ever to use Scala as a functional programming language this is the way to go. I really recommend you to, at least, try to learn this paradigm, as it is design purpose and has many advantages. But, then again, even now I sometimes go back to imperative programming in Scala myself because is more natural to me. Scala as imperative language is pretty similar to Java, so as a side effect I ended up learning how to read Java code (I knew some Java but only the basics, learning Scala my Java understanding improved a lot).

But, lets say that functional programming is way too much to deal with now and you want to know a type more similar to Python lists, the oldie but goodie mutable lists. You have a couple of options of data structures available in Scala, I'll present two of the most commons.

Following with the series in this crash course from Python to Scala, today I'll introduce one of the most useful Scala's data structures and make the comparison to Python.

Scala Lists

Starting off with one of the most used data structures in Scala (and in functional languages in general) and also the most common data structure in Python as well: the lists.

Following my series of tutorial of Scala for Python programmers, I'll start to talk about something most Python programmers don't usually pay attention to because the language doesn't require it to do so.

Scala Types

I'm talking about data types. It's not that Python doesn't have types for its variables, but as it is a dynamically typed programming language, you usually don't care about the type of the variable. At least not unless you try to add a number and a letter: you cannot add apple and oranges, naturally you cannot add strings and numbers (not at least without conversion first):

This is the first post in a series in which I'll try to give a nice insight for the Scala Language to a programmer with background in Python. I chose to do these posts since, at least when I started this series, the "Scala for people coming from Python" tutorial was a work in progress.

First of all I'll state some of my background (in case you didn't check my about page), in a kind of a disclaimer. There are people out there who are experts in Python. I'm not one of them. I only have a background of 4 years in this language, and only work with the 2.X version (started with 2.5 until 2.7). Never even try to learn Python 3. Also, there are experts on Scala as well, I'm not one of those either. In fact, my Scala knowledge is far from deep, I learned Scala at the end of last year and been using it since then (along with Python).

There are people out there who are experts in Python. I'm not one of them. [...] Also, there are experts on Scala as well, I'm not one of those either.

Once you know this, I'll just say I have enough knowledge of both Scala and Python to get by. I've done some projects in Django and some projects in Play Framework, but nothing really impressive. The reason I'm doing this set of tutorials is because when I started to learn Scala I didn't have one and many times I end up in Stackoverflow looking for how to do in Scala things I did in Python.