Scala for the Impatient

In 1995, I got a call from Gary Cornell who told me that we were going to write a Java book. That surprised memdash;I didn#039;t know any Java, and I was pretty sure that Gary didn#039;t know it either. But Gary knew that Java would be big. So we set out to write, as fast as we could, the first Java book that showed how to write real code. (There already were a couple of books out, such as the regrettable ldquo;Teach yourself Java in 21 daysrdquo;, but they focused on giving the illusion of knowledge.) Core Java appeared a few weeks after the Java 1.0 release, and it was an instant best-seller. A 9th edition will be out later this year, covering Java 7. When I first heard about Scala, nobody told me that it was going to be big, so I didn#039;t write a book. Of course, other people did. I got a few, but I found that I never read any of them. I just wrote code and read blogs whenever I got stuck. And I spent way too much time on stackoverflow.com. What was wrong with the books? For me, two things. First, I didn#039;t care to be told that I had sinned and must repent, and embrace the functional style in all its goodness, and only then could I hope to lead a useful life. More importantly, I was just too impatient. I know what a loop and a class and a function is. I don#039;t want to read that stuff again. So, why not just stick with the blogs? There are several good blogs that try to get a Java programmer up to speed with Scala, and I...

Date: January, 29 2011
Url: http://www.java.net/blog/cayhorstmann/archive/2011/01/28/scala-impatient

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