Dick had the idea to review a puzzle he previously implemented in Java and then reimplemented with Scala. He was looking for a way to optimize it so Bill took the leadership and we happily participated in a 21 person peer programming session, you can bet it was fun as at some point the discussion geared towards a better algorithm for solving the problem, nothing related to Scala per se. Anyways eventually we made it back on track and had a working solution, a very Scala-ish one as it used matchers (kind of replacement for Java's switch for this particular case), mutable and immutable values, implicit variables a la Perl/Ruby (as a matter of fact there was a bit of indecision if we should go with list.foldLeft(n) or (n /: list)(blah), interesting though).
In the end I walked out with the following
- Scala Eclipse plugin installed (should have done that before)
- Maven plugin installed (ditto)
- knowledge on foldLeft/foldRight's short syntax
- a bit more of understanding on actors
- Scalatest (a testing framework) looks good, FunSuites are great
