Scala + Processing – an entertaining way to learn a new language
From the post:
If you’ve read a book about some new technology it doesn’t necessarily mean that you learned or even understood it. Without practice your newly acquired knowledge will vanish soon. That’s why doing exercises from the book you are reading is important.
But all those examples are usually boring. Of course you can start your own pet project to master your skills. Several months ago to learn Scala I started my little command line tool which semi-worked at the end and I gave up on it. So, in a month or so I had to google syntax of “for loop”…
That’s where I decided that I should start writing simple examples for different Scala features that must be fun. Here’s where Processing comes into play. Using it, every novice like me can turn dull exercises into visual installations. And later you can try advanced stuff like fractals, particle systems or data visualisation.
You might be wondering what the hell is Scala. It’s a relatively new and extremely cool programming language. You can read more about it on Wikipedia or on official web site.
Processing, in case you haven’t heard, is a graphics language/environment. Has a great deal of potential for topic maps and their representations.