QUICKLENS SCALA FULL
QUICKLENS SCALA CODE

For better or for worse, the majority of programmers come from an object-oriented, imperative world. However, using exotic functional constructs (by exotic, I mean constructs that come from functional libraries such as scalaz or cats) makes your codebase significantly less approachable for new joiners.

These functional constructs can encourage useful abstractions and decoupling, and learning how they work will make you a better programmer. These are accompanied by blog posts describing how using them will change your life. Avoid exotic functional constructsīeing a functional language, Scala has a number of libraries that add a menagerie of functional constructs: functors, lenses, monoids etc.

QUICKLENS SCALA CODE

After all, we are paid to write code other people can read, not to scratch intellectual itches. So before you wrap all your side-effects in the free monad, or before you implement an internal DSL to represent business logic, think about whether the abstraction is justified, or whether you are getting misled by a programmer’s natural search for elegance. For instance, if you express behaviour through an internal DSL, to really understand how a program works, you have to look at both the code in the DSL and at the DSL interpreter.

QUICKLENS SCALA FULL

By design, each abstraction level contains incomplete information about the full behaviour of the system. By easily allowing the definition of internal DSLs, Scala takes this abstracting power a step further.Ībstraction comes at a cost: to gain a full understanding of a system, you have to switch back and forth between abstraction levels. This is due in part to how easy it is to write anonymous functions and classes. It lets us build complex systems without losing our sanity. The ability to abstract behaviour is one of the cornerstones of programming. This blog post is about these conventions. We have also adopted some conventions that make our codebase more approachable. This is mostly thanks to pair programming, code reviews and a culture of mutual help. It is a language that is hard to learn and even harder to master.ĭespite the difficulty of the language, engineers who have just joined the team start contributing effectively in a relatively short time. There are many good things about Scala, but approachability is not one of them. In this post, we will look at conventions that make our codebase more approachable for new joiners. In the first post, we looked at conventions that reduced the likelihood of introducing bugs.

This is the last post in a two-part series describing conventions that we have adopted when developing the Faculty platform.

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