Scala: What do “effect” and “effectful” mean in functional programming?

When you get started with functional programming (FP) a common question you’ll have is, “What is an effect in functional programming?” You’ll hear advanced FPers use the words effects and effectful, but it can be hard to find a definition of what these terms mean.

A Dart string capitalize function

I was surprised to learn that Dart doesn’t have a string capitalize method, so if you ever need a capitalize method/function, here’s a start towards a solution:

String capitalize(String s) => s[0].toUpperCase() + s.substring(1);

That function will work with Dart strings like these:

A Dart function to get the current date/time in a “seconds since the epoch” format

As a brief note, if you need a Dart function to get the current date/time in a “seconds since the epoch” format, I can confirm that this function works:

/// the current time, in “seconds since the epoch”
static int currentTimeInSeconds() {
    var ms = (new;
    return (ms / 1000).round();

Explaining Scala’s `val` function syntax

This is an excerpt from my book on Functional Programming in Scala. It’s an appendix that “explains and explores” Scala’s function syntax.


I wrote in the “Functions are Values” lesson that most developers prefer to use the def syntax to define methods — as opposed to writing functions using val — because they find the method syntax easier to read than the function syntax. When you write methods, you let the compiler convert them into functions with its built-in “Eta Expansion” capability. There’s nothing wrong with this. Speaking as someone who used Java for 15+ years, the def syntax was easier for me to read at first, and I still use it a lot.

My Scala Sed project: More features, returning strings

Table of Contents1 - Basic use2 - Using a Map3 - Match expressions4 - Sed limitations5 - My Sed project6 - Bonus: Factories and HOFs

My Scala Sed project is still a work in progress, but I made some progress on a new version this week. My initial need this week was to have Sed return a String rather than printing directly to STDOUT. This change gave me more ability to post-process a file. After that I realized it would really be useful if the custom function I pass to Sed had two more pieces of information available to it:

  • The line number of the string Sed passed to it
  • A Map of key/value pairs the helper function could use while processing the file

Note: In this article “Sed” refers to my project, and “sed” refers to the Unix command-line utility.

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Basic use

In a “basic use” scenario, this is how I use the new version of Sed in a Scala shell script to change the “layout:” lines in 55 Markdown files whose names are in the files-to-process.txt file:

A Java method that returns a random boolean value based on a probability

If you ever need a Java method that returns a boolean value based on a given probability, I can confirm that this method works:

 * `probability` should be given as a percentage, such as
 * 10.0 (10.0%) or 25.5 (25.5%). As an example, if `probability` 
 * is 60% (60.0), 100 calls to this function should return ~60 
 * `true` values.
 * (Note that Math.random returns a value >= 0.0 and < 1.0.)
static boolean getRandomBoolean(float probability) {
    double randomValue = Math.random()*100;  //0.0 to 99.9
    return randomValue <= probability;

Java: A Java list `tail` function (for ArrayList, LinkedList, etc.)

As a brief note today, I was working on a Java/Android application recently, and I needed a “tail” function when I was working on a Java list. What I mean by that is that Scala has a tail function that returns all elements of the list except for the head element, like this:

scala> val x = List(1,2,3,4)
x: List[Int] = List(1, 2, 3, 4)

scala> x.tail
res1: List[Int] = List(2, 3, 4)  //head element removed

and I wanted the same thing in Java.