Improve examples (code & text) of the 6 bullet points on the frontpage

[heathermiller]

We need to integrate them somehow- maybe make a page with the 9 examples w/ explanations and then have each box link to an anchor on each. Asked for by Martin.

[heathermiller]

Tentatively assigned to Sandro (thinking that this could be an actually fun ticket to close). No huge rush on this one, we should just do it before the end of the week.

We'd need to make a new page with the examples listed, and then each box would link to each corresponding anchor/subsection on that new page

[vjovanov]

Note: there will be only 6 bullet points on the main page. DSLs, immutability, and implicits will be removed.

[heathermiller]

ping...

I'm currently working on these bullet points right now. I'm probably an hour off from doing the styling. At that time, for each of the six bullet points, I'll need to know:

• whether I've got to style one or two code snippets (like for the Java interop example)
• how much text there is accompanying and explaining the code snippet
• how the text is organized around the code snippet (e.g., paragraphs before or after, or just one paragraph)

[sjrd]

Reminds me that someone suggested another mini-text for Type inference:

Don't work for the type system. Let the type system work for you!

I can't remember who suggested this or where, but I upvote it!
WDYT?

[heathermiller]

Nice! I like it. So in addition to what's there? So it'd say:

So the type system doesn't feel so static. Don't work for the type system. Let the type system work for you!

The reason why I suggest leaving the first sentence in is because I've not mentioned static typing anywhere. Here I just alluded to it.

[sstucki]

Hi, I added some of the code snippets from the original scroll. Due to my essentially non-existing Javascript-foo, switching/hiding doesn't work properly for the bottom row, and the code is not prettyfied.

I also added a small shell-script for converting Scala code into files containing properly escaped JS-strings (for more convenient editing of the snippet-files). I'm sure there's a nicer way to do this, but for now it works.

Snippets for the other 3 bullet points are in the making.

[heathermiller]

Hey, I already commented inline in your commit: 97a6190#commitcomment-3132780

I've also pushed where I am, as I've been working on the js and styling.

Bottom-line: you've only got to worry about content. So we need both code snippets and some text (only a little bit, should be kept short) explaining the examples. I've consolidated the slider thing and the bullet points into one thing now

[heathermiller]

Ack, you should've pinged me. We were working simultaneously on the same problem. I had no idea. I ended up resolving it by just embedding the scala snippets on the front page of the website and then having the javascript just move the content in and out of the visible code snippet box.

So now we can just write normal legible code, the only thing is that they have to be like this:

<figure class="code">
  <figcaption>caption!</figcaption>
  <pre><code>
      def increment(xs: List[Int]): List[Int] =
        xs.map(_ + 1)
  </pre></code>
</figure>

All the figure stuff just puts the code snippets into a nice box. That's all.

[sjrd]

The reason why I suggest leaving the first sentence in is because I've not mentioned static typing anywhere. Here I just alluded to it.

OK. Keeping both is fine, I think.

[sstucki]

Added code snippets for all topics now. WDYT?

[sjrd]

Cool!
I'm not in particular awe before the Traits example. But then, this is non-constructive comment as I don't have better to suggest that takes so few space...
The others are very good, I think.

Minor thing (which I think was already mentioned by someone someday): in the pattern matching example, Tree (and Node) must be covariant in type T: Tree[+T] and Node[+T]. Otherwise Leaf which extends Tree[Nothing] cannot be assigned to, e.g., a Tree[String].

[heathermiller]

Awesome! Thanks a lot!!

I agree with The Honorable Jean Robert about the traits example- I think we can come up with something better for that one.

The objective in these six squares is to really drive home how cool Scala can be. I think we can improve the strength of that argument in a couple of the examples.

In Java interop, for example, I get the feeling that the "power of interoperability" point could be overlooked. If you were a Java developer and you were looking at the example, you might even miss noticing PrintStream and FileOutputStream because they come up often in Java-land and they're rather unremarkable classes. What I thought we might be able to do instead, to really illustrate the power of interoperability, is to maybe have two files... One a Scala file and the other a Java file, and we could extend the Java class from Scala, and the Java source could even call into Scala, seamlessly. That could really drive the point home, I think.

As suggested earlier, this requires more from me on the styling because I'd then make sure that two code snippets could fit into the box, along with some text.

In general, I think we should throw some text into these boxes- if you're not used to reading Scala, figuring out the point of the code snippet could be futile.

Anyway, I suppose I can take care of a lot of this stuff hopefully today, if not today, then this weekend.

[sstucki]

thanks for the comments @heathermiller and @sjrd ! Totally agree.

I know the traits snippet sucks a bit, but I wanted something short. The best illustration of traits are the Scala collections IMHO. But I don't know how to shrink Iterable to a code snippet... For interoperability, I think the two-file idea is good, we'd need to fit the snippets side-by-side though. Also, we have to make sure that the Scala and Java are immediately distinguishable as such.

Anyway, I'll take the semaphore and fix the variance issue in the PM snippet now.PM snippet is fixed.

[heathermiller]

Cool, sounds good!

Two windows are totally fine. The way we can differentiate them is by using that top bar thing, we can call one file Whatever.scala and the other file SomethingElse.java and then we can have a comment at the top of each window that says:

// Java

// Scala

Hopefully that'd be clear enough