Wow, it’s been quite a long time since i’ve blogged the last time (that’s for the one or other reason that would only bother you, so in essence – please excuse) . But now i can’t keep calm any longer, since there’s an increasing number of articles, claiming that e.g. Functional Programming – in particular using Scala – is too hard to get for the average programmer.
First of all, there isn’t any ‘Java Joe’ (as a synonym for all those so called ‘dumb’ Programmers) out there. Well ok, if it is, then i’m the ideal protoype of that Joe! And as such i can tell you, if you’re willing to learn some new ideas and try to improve your programming skills, than Scala may provide you with a bunch of whole new concepts, not only from the functional world (and i’m not even talking about type systems here).
In fact, i don’t care if it’s Scala, Haskell or any other language, as soon as it may widen my horizon. But i would answer to all those who think Scala is to hard to grasp, that it’s only a matter of how you would pick up those persons. Granted, it may be difficult to meet those ‘newcomers’ at their common ground – there are some complaints out there that some Scala community members might behave too elitist when it comes to blaming Scala as being too difficult (like ‘it’s not Scala which is too difficult, it’s only you who don’t understand it’).
Frankly, i can follow those complaints. If you’re willing to learn and may have some problems to grasp some blog posts about Scala (or any other language) or even some code snippets, it is by way no solution to retreat to a position, saying your just to dumb (or lazy or whatsoever) to get it. Spitting out some code snippets or short articles everey now and then is easy – especially if they come without any context or any larger explanation. That’s really the easy part! The hard part is meeting that so called average Java Joe at his level and escort him intellectually!
So as a community of Scala fellows (or in any other way), we need to stop judge over those large herd of programmers as being too dumb. That’s simply not true! There may be some individuals too sluggish to learn and excel. But for all those others, who may have a hard job and having no chance to deal and become proficient with Scala at day (and therefore have only some hours at night) , we need to provide a way of guidance. And that’s best done to face that before mentioned reality. It’s not the people who are dumb. We as a community are dumb if we don’t react to that reality and welcome those people on their ground!
Appendix
In order to walk the talk, i decided to resume my work on writing about functional Scala! Hopefully some may still find it a useful intro to get into the ideas of functional programming in Scala.
brain driven development 