Introduction to Scala and Functional Programming

Lavínia Paganini, the campus expert from UFPE, performed live on Scala and functional programming with a workshop at our local community at JUET.

In this workshop, we learnt about Scala — a programming language used in companies like Netflix, Twitter, and LinkedIn — focusing on the features based in the Functional Programming paradigm. It’s important to know at least one programming language and have the basic concepts of programming to enjoy this workshop.

Functional programming is a new topic and we’ve come very far with functional architecture in cloud applications. We saw a functional approach to designing front-end components with Pritish in an earlier workshop, and used AWS Lambda with Adil in the last workshop. Getting to learn a programming language that employs a functional approach was a big motivation for the Scala workshop.

As always, we had a nice trivia, including discussion about Hack Grrrl. Lavínia also mentioned Haskell is a good programming language to go for to explore functional programming more.

I personally enjoyed the talk. It was amazing, the presentation was super professional. The demonstration actually makes you want to learn Scala. At this point I’m just left looking up the Scala documentation now. I believe students are motivated to develop projects in Scala. I especially loved the example on the Monoid class.