How Scala Prevented My House From Burning Down

My interest in Scala can be traced back to a Phlly Lambda presentation given by Toby Dipasquale last January. More recently I was meeting with someone about a data visualization project and they mentioned they were using Scala for a couple of startups they were working on. For those of you unfamiliar with Scala here’s a blurb from the Scala language website:

“Scala is a general purpose programming language designed to express common programming patterns in a concise, elegant, and type-safe way. It smoothly integrates features of object-oriented and functional languages. It is also fully interoperable with Java.

The thing that made Scala particularly interesting to me was that it was a functional language, and that it’s fully interoperable with Java. I’ve been using a couple Java libraries for some projects I’m working on and I haven’t been enjoying it all that much. My hopes were that I could use Scala to make those projects more enjoyable, while at the same time learning a functional language (although it’s not a purely functional language).

To help me on my journey of learning Scala I asked @codeslinger and @markchadwick for Scala book recommendations. Although, the pickings are slim, they both recommended Programming in Scala. A couple weeks ago I bought the PDF form of the book and began working my way through it. For anyone interesting in learning Scala I’d definitely recommend it. It covers a lot of ground, and is well written. Oh, and it also prevented my house from burning down!

Since I have the PDF version of the book I’ve been printing out chapters periodically (reading on a computer screen sucks). This past Saturday morning I was sitting around watching my kids make a complete mess of the house and decided that I wanted to continue on with Programming in Scala. As such I printed out the next chapter. As I walked upstairs into my office (which is in the attic) I began to smell something out of the ordinary. As I went further up the smell got worse. I didn’t think much of it, and grabbed the printouts and headed back downstairs. When I got downstairs I noticed the entire chapter didn’t print out, so I went back to the computer and re-printed the chapter. When I made my way upstairs the second time the smell was again worse then before and also more identifiable. It smelled like an electrical fire! It turns out that one of my computers more or less blew up, had ejected it’s CD tray and had smoke bellowing out the front. I have no way of knowing what would have happened had I not been so interested in reading more about Scala, but I’m glad that Scala and Programming Scala hooked me and led me upstairs to catch my exploding computer early.

So the moral of the story is that if you’re looking for a language to learn, consider Scala….it just might prevent your house from burning down! :)

Cheers,
Steve