Functional Roundup for July 21, 2017

by Maureen Elsberry
•
July 20, 2017
•
functional roundup• scala quest• scala• sbt
|
5 minutes to read.

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

While there are a handful of online learning tools out there for Scala (including our own Scala Exercises) there’s always room for more, especially when it includes wizards.

On July 19th, Alejandro Lujan and Christian Leger launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a project they’ve been working on called Scala Quest.

According to the campaign,

“ScalaQuest takes place in DataLand, a place where land produces data, and its inhabitants harvest data to survive.

In DataLand, many mysterious forces have arisen, with mystical names such as 4-train, C-cross-cross and Hava. They all made data harvesting more efficient, but they all came with dangers of their own. Eventually, Complexity Plagues appeared, forces became slow and inefficient. Whole crops were lost. Those were difficult times for all.

Within DataLand, a powerful wizard named Ski has roamed for a while, taming many of these forces. Recently, he’s discovered a new force and named it Scala.

However, Ski knows this great power needs to be wielded wisely, so he’s gathering an order of apprentices, who can use Scala skillfully and with great care.

He’s called this the Order of The Ski, or Order[Ski] for short.

This is where you come in.

You shall become his apprentice, and learn Scala through practice and peril. You will start on the warm, safe haven of Values and Expressions, cross the Classes and Objects plains, hike over Variance Hills and make your way to the treacherous Implicit Forests.”

The team is aiming to have eight complete levels at an estimated launch date of 2018. After launch, they hope to release a new level every month. They promise to offer this at a low monthly subscription rate.

Wizards, goblins, Scala, and an Odersky pun? Count us in. Let’s face it, you had me at wizard.

View the kickstarter and contribute here: Scala Quest.

The latest from sbt 1.0.0-RC1 on the road to sbt 1.0.0 was released on

According to the announcement, the release includes new features, bug fixes, and changes with compatibility implications including:

#1104 - Zinc 1: Class-based name hashing
lm#100 - Frozen mode to the Ivy-based library management, which makes sure that the resolution is always intransitive
#1911 - Add logging of the name of the different build.sbt (matching *.sbt) files used
#3115 - For faster startup, reuse the same global instance for parsing

You can read the full release notes here: sbt 1.0.0-RC2.

On July 20th, the latest version of Slick was announced. According to the notice, the major changes in 3.2.1 include:

3f5c6753b - fixing part 1 of #1408, flatmaps in the tail position of a query are unrolled into nested bind clauses* Strip margins of multi-line SQL interpolator strings
8b342b4a1 - Integrate the four official Activator templates into the manual
ddb75a0f9 - Fix ambiguity for MappedProjection Shape
21045bbf2 - use mix of Java/scala reflection to retrieve inUseCount on 2.12.x

You can read the full release notes here: Slick 3.2.1.

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. Scala Swarm 2017 edition!

Holden Karau:

Holden Karau presented Apache Spark: Beyond Shuffling at Scala Swarm 2017. You can watch the video here:

___

Silvia Moura Pina:

Silvia Moura Pina presented Coding Under Uncertanity at Scala Swarm 2017. You can watch the video here:

Harry Laoulakos:

Harry Laoulakos presented Monad Stacks or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Free Monad at Scala Swarm 2017. You can watch the video here: