How I feel about Scala

I posted my feelings about Scala to a question on Quora.  

Is there a programming language that's as elegant and supported as Haskell, and as practically useful as Erlang?

When to use Applicative vs Monad

A nice rule of  as to when you must use Monad and when you can use Applicative style:

How do you use Control.Applicative to write cleaner Haskell?


Update:   May be another way to look at this is to think of >>= as combinator that applies the mapping function then  flattens the result of application of  (a -> mb), and (in some implementations) change the computation based on the value of the "a".   In computations where the >>= is only flattening the types, it can be converted to an Applicative computation.

Adding numbers as digits in a list

In a phone interview with an un-named company :)  I was asked to come up with solution for hypothetical adder where  input data are integers  but are given as list of single digits.     For instance 345 would be [3,4,5].   Problem is to write an adder for the numbers.    I kind of like the simplicity of the solution in Haskell ( as oppose to my java-like doodle in the interview).

You can find my code Here

 
 

Refreshing my statistics

I am watching a nice set of lectures of Harvard's Stat 110 class.
Watch the Lectures
Professor Joe Blitzstein is great. One particularly puzzling problem is presented at 36:00 minute of Stat 123 teaser.
I have not been able to figure out the puzzle in the expected value of Euro and $. If you happen to have any ideas on this I would appreciate it.