Starting Scala & R Language

Its always good to learn at least one new programming language per year to sustain in software engineering industry as architect or in any development position. At least need to know what are the capabilities and some hands on experience on the new language we are learning every year.

Last year I was with PowerShell. It is a nice language. Less code more things. That is the beauty if it. Also piping is a great feature. Seamless integration with .Net programs etc...

This year I decided to learn something not much related to .Net. One is Scala and other is R language.

Why interested in Scala & R as a hard core .Net guy?

Let us see some code fragments in these languages.

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//Scala

  def OddOrEven(a: Int) = {
    if (a % 2 == 0) "Even"
    else "Odd"
  }

---

There is not more things interesting here except the absence of return statement. Yes the language now can understand programmer's intention and can remove strict rules.

This is just a start. There are more things out there in scala which makes programming faster with less code.

After working in delivery oriented organization which maintains huge amount of legacy code, I feel the way to survive in intense delivery environment is to stick to the below principle

"Less code less defects"

Some of the features are already available in C# in the form of lambda expressions, automatic properties etc...But Scala seems more simplified and takes advantage of great JVM.

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# R Program to increment all members in list
a=c(10,12,13)
a=a+1
print(a)

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The same thoughts here. Less code as well as R is very good for statistical programming.

There are many more reasons why these languages are becoming popular. Just google for more features.

Setting up the environment for these 2 languages is very easy. Next time I will post it.