Functional Program Design in Scala

The second class in the Scala specialization down. I was a little put off by the fact that this is basically a retooled/abridged version of the "Functional Reactive Programming" class, which made it feel incomplete. Regardless, the programming exercises were fun, if a bit lightweight. The lecture material was ... meh.

My solutions on Github: FunctionalProgramDesignScala

Generating a bigram language model from the Wikipedia corpus

Motivation

While working through the Scala Principles class, the final unit had an example exercise that involved creating a "mnemonic" for a telephone number by mapping the number to an English "phrase". While a fun exercise, I was unsatisfied with the naive generation of mnemonic phrases. Yes, you could get "Scala is fun" for 7225247386, but you also get:

• sack air fun
• pack ah re t
• pack bird to
• Scala ire to
• rack ah re to
• pack air fun
• sack bird to
• rack bird to
• sack ah re to
• rack air fun

... which are decidedly less helpful. I thought that if I could implement even a simplistic language model, like a bigram model, to the options, and then rank them, I could make the output a little more useful. So I went looking for some bigram data, and eventually ran across a Wikipedia corpus on corpusdata.org.  The second paragraph points out that prepping the data yourself is hard work and would require many hours, so paying them $295 for it is a steal. Challenge accepted mofos.

Functional Programming Principals in Scala

After a long break (Advanced Algos took a lot out of me), I decided it was time to take another class. When the topic of taking the Scala series of classes from Coursera came up in my programming group, I jumped at the chance. I needed a break from theory, and a chance to do some coding in a new language was just the ticket. This post covers the first course in the series, "Functional Programming Principles in Scala". tl;dr: Take this course, it's great!