Coderetreat: Java 8 vs Scala

Coderetreat (http://coderetreat.org/) is a day-long, intensive practice event, focusing on the fundamentals of software development and design. By providing developers the opportunity to take part in focused practice, away from the pressures of “getting things done”, the coderetreat format has proven itself to be a highly effective means of skill improvement.

This event is fully devoted to the upcoming Java 8, its features, and how it all stacks up against alternative languages like Scala. We are going to present what's new and what's different. After that we'll pull an extended, focused coding session coderetreat-style.

The coding session has three parts:

• Building a thing in Java with the common pre-8 approach.
• Redoing it with Java 8 features (“how is 8 different?”).
• Redoing it with Scala (“how is Scala different?”).

Discussion of all three approaches will follow.

Pro-tips and considerations:

• You should bring your own laptop, or share with a friend.
• It's better to work in pairs.
• We'll help you set up JDK 8, but you should know what a JDK is.
• We'll raffle out one IntelliJ IDEA (http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/) license at the end of event.