Functional Roundup for March 23, 2017

by Maureen Elsberry
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March 23, 2017
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functional roundup• scala• scala native• scala-js• intellij idea• akka• sbt
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4 minutes to read.

Here are some of the latest updates, projects, talks, articles, and events in the Functional Programming community:

The latest IntelliJ IDEA release from JetBrains is packed with a lot of improvements and new features.

Some of the highlights according to Pavel Fatin include support for Akka, a cleaner UI, REPL mode support for worksheet architecture, and a built-in SBT shell (making it possible to build projects using SBT).

Read the full announcement here: Scala plugin for IntelliJ IDEA 2017.1.

The latest release of Scala.js focuses on replacing some less than favored features with better versions. The release also highlights a few JavaScript interoperability features:

The standard library now contains the API for ECMAScript 2015 symbols (as js.Symbol) and iterables/iterators (as js.Iterable and js.Iterator).
Use 1@JSExportStatic1 to define static members on Scala.js-defined JS classes.

The team notes that this release is in preparation for Scala.js 1.0.0.

Read the full announcement here: Announcing Scala.js 0.6.15.

According to Eugene Yokota, sbt 0.13.14-RC2 includes adding false positive on “Executing batch mode,” writes out project/build.properties file when missing, scripted plugin improvements, and more.

The release will become 0.13.14 final if no serious bugs are found by March 31st.

Read the full announcement here: sbt 0.13.14-RC2 release notes.

Scala Native was first teased last year during Denys Shabalin’s Scala Days NYC talk. Since then, the optimizing ahead-of-time compiler for Scala has gathered quite the fan club.

According to the release notes, the first version includes the following features:

Support for the whole Scala language with negligible semantic differences.
Effortless zero-cost interoperability with native code.
Out-of-the-box support for existing Scala IDEs.
Seamless integration with sbt build tool.
Cross-publishing infrastructure against JVM, JS, and Native platforms.
Support for the core subset of the JDK base libraries

For more details, check out the full announcement: Scala Native V0.1 Is Here!.

People have been waiting pretty anxiously for the latest course of the Scala MOOCs to drop, and of last week, it’s officially here!

This MOOC covers Spark’s programming model in detail, and according to the course description, you will learn to:

Read data from persistent storage and load it into Apache Spark
manipulate data with Spark and Scala
express algorithms for data analysis in a functional style
recognize how to avoid shuffles and recomputation in Spark

The upcoming session starts April 10th!

Read the full announcement here: Spark/Scala MOOC + Capstone Project Now Live on Coursera.

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:

Juan Manuel Serrano:

Juan Manuel Serrano presented on All roads lead to…lambda at London Scala Users Group. Check out the video here: