Back to the Roots

Yesterday evening, and also most of today, I spent coding in Scala. I was prototyping a layout algorithm. I implemented the prototype in Scala, nicely test-driven (ScalaTest), and using IntelliJ as the IDE. I've used Scala before, but ScalaTest and IntelliJ was new for me.

The coding was/is a lot of fun! As you probably know, these days I spend most of my time doing meta stuff: languages, meta models, code generators. Or, if I code, it's either C (in customer projects) or it's Java based on huge frameworks (usually Eclipse or JEE stuff). Programming against these frameworks is not so much about creatively programming, it's more about understanding and mastering existing frameworks, which can be very frustrating.

Over the last two days, the only framework I had to work with was Java2D. Everything else is very much self-contained, really nice OO design. Scala is really refreshing, and I have to say, I start understanding people who say that IntelliJ is the better IDE for Java development... Eclipse is of course very useful because of it's plugin architecture and the huge amount of existing plugins, but for pure coding... IntelliJ really is nice.

So, in summary: this was a lot of fun. I should do more coding like this :-)  permalink