Underscore Blog
underscore.io · Company blog · on HN since 2014
Underscore is a Scala consultancy in the UK whose blog and books cover functional programming, Cats, type-driven development, and Slick.
What HN saysCommenters recommend its Essential Scala book and blog to people learning Scala, and name it among the better Scala company blogs.
31HN people shared it
13linked it in comments
48stories submitted
727story points
5 years agolast shared
2014people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Type Driven Development in Scala3 people · 12 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 2Probabilistic Programming in Scala3 people · 11 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 3Free Monads are Simple3 people · 6 points · first shared 2015 · discussion on HN
- 4Scala with Cats3 people · 4 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 5An Introduction to Cats3 people · 1 points · first shared 2015 · discussion on HN
- 6Typechecking SQL in Slick and Doobie2 people · 40 points · first shared 2015 · 7 comments on HN
- 7Keeping Scala Simple2 people · 12 points · first shared 2015 · discussion on HN
- 8Getting into Other People's (Scala) Code2 people · 8 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 9Scala.js Is Important for Cloud Services2 people · 5 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 10Uniting Church and State: FP and OO Together2 people · 2 points · first shared 2017 · discussion on HN
- 11Essential scala2 people · first shared 2020
- 12Underscore's Scala books are now open source1 people · 242 points · first shared 2017 · 34 comments on HN
- 13Creative Scala: A New Introduction to Scala1 people · 120 points · first shared 2015 · 28 comments on HN
- 14Sealed Traits in Scala1 people · 53 points · first shared 2015 · 2 comments on HN
- 15Monadic IO: Laziness Makes You Free1 people · 51 points · first shared 2015 · 35 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
jmfldn · 2021-12-06
I do indeed. The "red book" aka Functional Programming in Scala I wouldn't recommend to a beginner. It teaches FP at a fairly deep level to the extent of implementing the abstractions yourself. Take a look at that later perhaps. Don't get me wrong, it is utterly brilliant but it wouldn't be the place to start.
I would recommend Essential Scala for the basics. Scala with Cats if you're going to be working with the Typelevel stack (a popular set of FP libraries). Lots of other resources but those two alone will take you far.
http://underscore.io/books/essential-scala/
http://underscore.io/books/scala-with-cats/
sideeffffect · 2020-03-29
Check out Scala! It has modern features and the tooling around it is mature.
If you like books, this should be a good intro: https://underscore.io/books/essential-scala/ (you should use IntelliJ IDEA instead of Eclipse, though)
And you can also use it for frontend development: https://www.scala-js.org/doc/sjs-for-js/es6-to-scala-part1.html (having one language for both backend and frontend leads to great synergy)
noelwelsh · 2020-01-24
The companies I work for are https://www.inner-product.com/ (US) and https://underscore.io/ (UK). Scala is our main focus. I'm afraid it's not as exciting as software + music. Mostly web services or data engineering.
spir · 2019-08-20
Scala 3 launches in 2020 after a new compiler was written over a five year period. The new compiler is named "Dotty".
A Tour of Scala 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Rnrx2lo9cw
Also, GraalVM's ahead of time compilation is somewhat of a competitor to Scala native https://www.graalvm.org/docs/reference-manual/aot-compilation/
Cat is great, this book is too http://underscore.io/books/scala-with-cats/
RBerenguel · 2017-04-21
The developer blog at StitchFix is excellent: http://multithreaded.stitchfix.com/blog/
Most Scala consultancies/companies have their own internal blogs and most are excellent, for instance, underscore: http://underscore.io/blog/
room271 · 2015-07-01
The Guardian | LONDON | ONSITE
Looking for fullstack or server-side devs interested in working on APIs and related tools using JVM languages (Scala at present) on AWS. The work is really interesting and the Guardian is a great company - both from a tech perspective because of our scale, and because of the journalism we do. I head this team from a tech side so any questions get in touch! ([email protected]).
More details here (ignore the technology list - more important is good ideas and a willingness to learn):
http://underscore.io/jobs/2015-05-20-guardian-discussion/
drol3 · 2020-08-10
Cool :)
Sometimes seeing the same concept from different perspectives makes it easier to understand. For a scala treatment of the same topic see
https://underscore.io/blog/posts/2017/06/02/uniting-church-and-state.h…
Also in Scala; an interesting solution to the expression problem:
https://i.cs.hku.hk/~bruno/papers/Modularity2016.pdf
Its a paper, but its very light on dense academic prose and very heavy on copy pastable code :)
sjrd · 2017-03-14
Actually, there are people using Scala.js to run Scala on AWS lambda, precisely for that reason.
* https://github.com/tptodorov/aws-lambda-scalajs
* http://underscore.io/blog/posts/2016/03/21/serverless-scale-summit.htm…
saosebastiao · 2017-01-15
You mean it's impossible to have compile time type safety of sql queries, and that the compiler can't tell the difference between an SQL string and any other string? You're wrong.
http://underscore.io/blog/posts/2015/05/28/typechecking-sql.html
acjohnson55 · 2016-04-16
After using many templating systems over the years, I'm sold on the opposite approach of embedding (a description of) the output language in the host language, rather than trying to embed logic in the output language. Think React or Scalatags. Logic becomes trivial, because it's the logic of the host language. And the output can be the output language, directly, or some other data structure (VDOM, in the case of React).
It's similar to the concept of the free monad [1].
[1] http://underscore.io/blog/posts/2015/04/14/free-monads-are-simple.html
jowiar · 2016-03-14
Awesome -- I'm super glad to see there's going to be some leadership by the folks from the "Scala, a language for making nice software" contingent to balance out the echo chamber of the "Scala, where if you don't have a graduate degree you're going to feel like a moron" contingent.
Edit: To clarify what I mean -- http://underscore.io/blog/posts/2015/06/10/an-introduction-to-cats.htm… exemplifies, to me, what is wrong in Scala-land. If Abstract Algebra is prerequisite knowledge for tools I 'really should be using', something has gone horribly wrong.
bad_user · 2015-07-08
While I have received some helpful advice from Tony Morris on the Scalaz mailing list, I think that attitudes like his are poisonous. And actually, it's because of such issues that some are attempting a Scalaz fork: http://underscore.io/blog/posts/2015/06/10/an-introduction-to-cats.htm…
On the other hand such an attitude is not representative of the Scala community, which is filled with really nice and helpful people. I just went to Scala Days in Amsterdam and everybody I've met was super nice. Try it sometimes.
What is "shared-immutable programming"?
aphexairlines · 2018-04-20
Scala open source projects from The Guardian:
https://github.com/guardian?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=&type=&langua…
Scala at Morgan Stanley:
https://www.reddit.com/r/scala/comments/480ral/scala_at_morgan_stanley…
https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/morgan-stanley-scala-jobs/?country=gb
Scala at Barclays:
https://underscore.io/jobs/2017-11-02-barclays/
Scala at Zalando:
https://jobs.zalando.com/tech/blog/why-we-do-scala
Scala open source projects from Twitter:
https://github.com/twitter?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=&type=&languag…