Functional Roundup for March 1, 2017

by Maureen Elsberry
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March 01, 2017
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functional roundup• scala• scastie• google cloud platform• free monads• haskell• lagom• machine learning
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4 minutes to read.

What happens when your team is pumping out awesome projects left and right? You get busy, and things get put on the backburner. Such was the fate of the Functional Roundup. But we’re back! Here are some of the latest updates, projects, talks, articles, and events in the Functional Programming community:

On February 20th, the Scala Center team announced the release of the Beta of Scastie, an interactive playground for Scala.

The concept was originally authored by Aleh Aleshka in order to create a collaborative debugging tool, a cool concept, but now they’ve gone one step further. Watch the demo to see Scastie in action.

Read the full announcement here: Introducing Scastie.

Google has boosted their Cloud Platform offerings with the public beta of NVIDIA Tesla K80 GPUs. You can now attach up to eight GPUs to any custom Google Compute Engine virtual machine, according the the release.

Did you know that 47 Degrees is a Google Cloud Platform Partner? Ask how we can help by getting in touch.

You can read the full announcement here: GPUs are now available for Google Compute Engine and Cloud Machine Learning

Finally, Lagom for Scala! On February 22nd, Lightbend announced the long-awaited release of the new Lagom Scala API, as well as JPA support.

While both the Java and Scala APIs are referred to as “first class citizens,” there are a few differences in the APIs with the Scala API focusing on type safety, according to the release:

Use of type class based serialization, based on play-json, rather than using Jackson’s reflection based databind API.
Use of compile time wired dependency injection, utilizing the cake pattern and MacWire, rather than using Guice.
Use of macros to implement service clients and to wire service implementations, rather than dynamic proxies and reflection.

View the full announcement here: Lagom 1.3.0release.

Check out this cool command line tool written in purely functional Haskell.

UpdateRepos does exactly what its name suggests…it updates all of your git repositories with a single command.

This was developed by Pedro Vicente Gómez Sánchez. You can view more information here: UpdateRepos

Additional great content and news:

Suggested information to digest this week:

The functional programming community has no shortage of excellent conferences, talks, and articles. Here are just a few that were released that we recommend checking out if you missed them the first time:

Daniela Sfregola

Daniela Sfregola presented A Practical Introduction to Category Theory at Voxxed Days Zurich 2017. View the video here:

Raul Raja:

Raul Raja presented on Functional Error Handling at Freakend Mobile 2017. Check out the slides here:

Johan Andrén:

Johan Andrén presented Asynchronous stream processing with Akka streams at JFokus in Stockholm. View the video here: