Scala Overview

Scala tutorial provides from basics to advance concepts. It is designed to target beginners as well as professionals.

What do you know about Scala?

The name scala comes from the word scalable and definitely, it is the powerful language which is used to develop the biggest websites in the world, including Twitter, Netflix, Tumblr, LinkedIn and many more.

You might have heard about Object Oriented Programming(OOPs) and Functional Programming(FP). Scala is comprised of both – OOPs and FP.Scala is influenced by Java, Haskell, Lisp, Pizza etc. and influenced to F#, Fantom, Red etc. You can use it to create any kind of application like Web Application , Desktop based application, enterprise application and mobile application etc.

Do you know, who created Scala?

Scala was created by Martin Odersky (the father of javac). It was released publicly in 2004 on Java Platform.

Few important points about Scala:

Let’s look at few points about scala to understand more closely.

• It’s a pure object-oriented programming (OOP) language. Every variable is an object, and every “operator” is a method.
• It is also a functional programming language(FP) where functions can be passed as variables.
• You can write your code using OOP, FP or both.
• Scala code runs on JVM. That’s why, you need JDK for writing Scala applications. It also means that you can easily move from java to Scala.
• You can also use the wealth of Java libraries. The Scala compiler compiles your Scala code into Java Byte Code, which can then be executed by the ‘scala‘ command.
• Scala is statically typed language which means, that type checking of a variable will be done at compile time(a static check), instead of doing it at run time(a dynamic check) as done in many languages like (e.g. JavaScript, Objective-C, PHP, Python, Ruby etc.). It may help to find trivial bugs at an early stage.
• File extension of scala source file may be either .scala or .sc.