noelwelsh

object Nullable {
  sealed trait NullableTag
  type Nullable[A] = A with NullableTag

  def nullAs[B]: Nullable[B] =
    null.asInstanceOf[Nullable[B]]

  implicit class ToNullable[A](val a: A) extends AnyVal {
    def `?`: Nullable[A] = a.asInstanceOf[Nullable[A]]
  }

non

What is the appeal of dynamically-typed languages?

Kris Nuttycombe asks:

I genuinely wish I understood the appeal of unityped languages better. Can someone who really knows both well-typed and unityped explain?

I think the terms well-typed and unityped are a bit of question-begging here (you might as well say good-typed versus bad-typed), so instead I will say statically-typed and dynamically-typed.

I'm going to approach this article using Scala to stand-in for static typing and Python for dynamic typing. I feel like I am credibly proficient both languages: I don't currently write a lot of Python, but I still have affection for the language, and have probably written hundreds of thousands of lines of Python code over the years.

djspiewak

Getting Started in Scala

This is my attempt to give Scala newcomers a quick-and-easy rundown to the prerequisite steps they need to a) try Scala, and b) get a standard project up and running on their machine. I'm not going to talk about the language at all; there are plenty of better resources a google search away. This is just focused on the prerequisite tooling and machine setup. I will not be assuming you have any background in JVM languages. So if you're coming from Python, Ruby, JavaScript, Haskell, or anywhere…  I hope to present the information you need without assuming anything.

Disclaimer It has been over a decade since I was new to Scala, and when I was new to Scala, I was coming from a Java and Ruby background. This has probably caused me to unknowingly make some assumptions. Please feel free to call me out in comments/tweets!

One assumption I'm knowingly making is that you're on a Unix-like platform. Sorry, Windows users.

Getting the JVM