The state of the Scala website and documentation
That&#x27;s interesting. Just a few days ago with great regret I decided to drop the (free) Scala course on Coursera after almost finishing week #3 (of 5 I think). I&#x27;m actually already pretty familiar at least with the essentials of functional programming but would like to go even deeper.<p>However, I found the step too steep between the easy to understand lectures and the exercises, and the latter not as useful as they could be. It felt like I was suddenly dropped off and left to my own devices with no guidance. &quot;Now implement this!&quot; Uhm... what? Sure, that&#x27;s easy, I&#x27;ve been implementing much more complicated things for decades. The problem is I have no idea how to approach it &quot;the right way&quot; as far as Scala is concerned, that&#x27;s why I&#x27;m taking the course!<p>Looking at the forum - extremely sparsely populated even after over 4 months - showed that I could also expect no guidance from there. That meant that even when I finished a task I was unable to find out if what I had done was the right (functional) way. For one and most importantly, there is hardly anyone to respond, but also since the only exercises are the homework assignments you can&#x27;t just post your code, that&#x27;s an &quot;honor code violation&quot;. There also is no &quot;solution&quot;, i.e. you can&#x27;t see how the course author(s) would have implemented it.<p>Another example, people in the forum complained about extreme differences in performance for very minor differences in the way you wrote something, and you had to find all of this out completely for yourself, again no guidance at all.<p>Another point is that I found the problems too academic. Sure, I can walk a list of head.tail or a tree of left.element.right tuples. But overall the problems were all from what I did a long time ago at university and it felt very, very far from what I deal with now - and I don&#x27;t just do CRUD or other boring stuff and actually <i>do</i> have interesting algorithms to implement. The course feels like being made for university students - in a negative way.<p>Overall I found the course more frustration than it was worth. I could have solved the programming challenges easily enough in a way I already knew, but what&#x27;s the point? I wanted to learn the <i>new</i> (Scala) way, but felt all alone in trying to do that.<p>The course was like a good violin player demonstrating a piece and then giving me some sheet music and shoving me out the door &quot;come back when you can play that&quot;. It&#x27;s hard to complain about &quot;free&quot;, but if course forum participation is a guide, both total numbers as well as the steep drop-off after week 1 and 2, it isn&#x27;t very successful.<p>The course: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.coursera.org&#x2F;learn&#x2F;progfun1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.coursera.org&#x2F;learn&#x2F;progfun1</a><p>Note: Enrolling in the courses individually is possible for free, going through the &quot;specialization&quot; page at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.coursera.org&#x2F;specializations&#x2F;scala" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.coursera.org&#x2F;specializations&#x2F;scala</a> only shows the for-pay option.