Boris Cherny (Creator of Claude Code): "The one technical book I would recommend to everyone that has had the greatest impact on me as an engineer is functional programming in Scala. You're probably never going to use Scala day today, but the way it teaches you to think about... coding problems is just such a change from the way that most people were in coding, either practically or in school. It's just. It's incredible. It's going to completely change the way that you code now. I think in types, when I code, the thing that matters in your code the most is the type signatures. This is more important than the code itself." Boris Chernyshow more

Are we having the Red Book renaissance?

This reminded me of being back in university when my chem prof said: carry the units through in the math. If the units are right, your answer is probably right. Same thing goes with types in programming: if the type works out, the code is usually right.

This book really helped me understand the core concepts of functional programming when I was struggling with Effect.ts. Highly recommend. Even just asking Claude to summarise the chapters and understanding the high level ideas is enough.

That book was brilliant. It's a book that pushes you to really understand the functional programming paradigm. This helps you grow significantly as a developer. A similar book is Haskell from First Principles.

>You're probably never going to use Scala day today Scala 3 has never been better. Strongly typed, difficult to represent invalid states, interop with java and javascript. Great for agent harnesses and coding with agents.

💯 Scala converted me to functional programming and eventually Clojure without ever shipping anything in Scala… Never got that much further than playing around with hello worlds. And yet learning about its pattern matching, lambdas, monads, etc. expanded my mind immensely.

Ah my favorite and the course by Martin Odersky was fantastic. I don’t think engineers are up for it these days.

There’s ineherent benefit in defining inputs and outputs precisely. Reading the function code becomes only necessary when figuring out implementation detail and now the function name can often be just a verb. This is true of Scala and also other strongly typed languages. LLMs also use less tokens when writing code like this, and it’s faster for humans to see intent in Claude Code or equivalent CLI agent outputs.

That book is rough lol

Shout out to @unisonweb The amazing language created by the authors of that book

How is it different than learning by using RxJava? It seems to cover the same ground but the book is a more “academic” proof?

@runarorama

和訳本としては、こちらになります。 Scala関数型デザイン&プログラミング

How could type signature be more important than the actual code ?

@kostyafarber_

Types over implementation every time. More people need to hear this.

The irony is that functional thinking is exactly what makes AI-generated code survivable. Type signatures are prompts for compilers. Every developer who thinks in types ships less AI slop — Boris's recommendation is functionally prophecy, not nostalgia.

This reminds me of an old interview of Java creator about his biggest regret. He said going full object with String instead of staying with… string.

Scala is the reason we still can't edit tweets.

Just learn rust

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I really like that book!

Scala is one of the best languages I've ever used. So thoughtfully designed. It just made a lot of sense. The excessive focus on immutability at the expense of performance, and complex typing at the expense of compilation speed, prevented them from being used for Android, etc.

Spot on, big fan of that book, it seriously rewired how I think about composing code even though I hardly touch Scala day to day.

But wasn’t code solved lmao

yes..Code is not the core object...structure is

@grok what does Boris mean by type signatures being the most important thing? Explain the how and the why to a non-engineer

Loved working through the book, even though it seemed incomplete in parts. But wish someone would re-write in another language.

I think anything in life that makes you think deeply about logic and first principles would have same impact. That includes philosophy. Human = "I think, therefore I am" AI = "I am" When you really think about it, peak AI + tech is basically entity no different than God but everyone now carries it in their pockets

i part completed the “Functional Programming Principles in Scala" course by Martin Odersky decided part way through there would not be enough work in it. Very elegant and concise language

Scala 3. Awesome, just awesome.

This and Odersky’s scala books are actually my bibles

Sure do this while Anthropic wipes out your product next week using typescript :)