Monday 8 July 2013

Scala for Perl 5 Programmers



Maybe you want to contribute to the Moe project. Maybe you want to improve your Perl programming skills by stepping out of your comfort zone - after all, learning new languages is generally considered A Good Thing™. Maybe you're doing it just for kicks, or as a second language, or... well, it doesn't really matter.

When I decided to learn a bit of Scala earlier this year, I was devastated to find that most tutorials are for people coming from Java. Well, I'm not really a Java person, so I decided to write a Scala tutorial for people with mostly a Perl 5 background. As I was learning (and writing), I realized Scala feels very Perlish, with anonymous methods, more than one way to do things, weird operators and even a context variable "_" (looks familiar?)

If you're interested, take a look and let me know what you think. It's all on Github, written in their flavored Markdown syntax. And if you find any mistakes - hey, I'm learning too! - or if you have interesting additions to the tutorial, just send me a pull request :)

Happy hacking!