Merry Christmas – or let it snow with Akka

I just played with Akka the other day, in order to get proficient to some of the basic patterns and idioms which come with the underlying Actor model.  I chose Conway’s Game of Life as a little pet project.  But instead of calculating the state of each cell by using a discrete computation model (that is calculating the state of the next generation for all cells by the fixed state of the cells current generation – then switch to the next generation, and so on)  i did it in a rather asynchronous way.

Functional Scala: Lambdas and other shortcuts

In the last episode, we discovered one of the most powerful concepts within the world of functional programming – Higher Order Functions. In essence, a Function is called higher ordered if it accepts another function as an argument or results into a function. This idea gives rise not only to some new ways of abstraction but also allows for pretty cool stuff like capturing or passing kind of state or building so called combinators (you may want to call them Function Makers) which will construct new functions out of some ingoing functions or some other input.