What is Scala and why should you learn it?

Scala is a general-purpose multi-paradigm programming language that provides support for functional programming and a strong static type system. Scala also smoothly integrates the features of object-oriented languages. It is an acronym for "Scalable Language". This means that Scala grows with you.

The scala was designed to express common programming patterns in a concise, elegant, and type-safe way. It has been created by Martin Odersky and released in 2003. At the time of writing, there were 269 contributors on the GitHub Scala repository.

Scala Programming is based on Java and runs on a Java virtual machine, so if you are aware of Java syntax, then it's pretty easy to learn Scala. It also comes with the Java Runtime Environment, also known as the JRE.

One good way to think of Scala is its like a static version of ruby, that has an emphasis on functional aspects. Some of the more complex features of the language ultimately make it easier for the developer to write better code and increase performance by programming in Scala. The language is designed to be clear and concise, with various implicit techniques to help simplify common tasks.

So, why should you learn Scala?

Scala is a language which scales well to tackle various problems. Scaling is refer in the sense of performance but in the sense that the language itself can seem to be expanded via libraries. Scala was created specifically with the goal of being a better language, shedding those aspects of Java which it considered restrictive, overly tedious, or frustrating for the developer.

As a result, there are indeed code distinctions and paradigm shifts that can make early learning of Scala programming a bit more difficult, but the result is a much cleaner and well organized language that is ultimately easier to use and increases productivity.

Scala can be used for the same things that any other general purpose language on the JVM runtime can be used for, which sort of boils down to different flavours of application programming.

Various Scala frameworks offer different approaches to asynchronous abstractions, such as Akka's message passing. Akka supports distribution by means of extending message passing to the cluster level, Finagle focuses on RPC, and for distributed data processing Spark is an obvious candidate.

Another goal of Scala was to bridge the gap between functional and object-oriented languages. It contains many constructs inspired functional languages. Even, some popular companies such as Twitter and LinkedIn have adopted Scala to improve the productivity of their developers.

The flexibilities of Scala

• Lines are automatically joined if they begin or end with a token t, or if there are unclosed parentheses or brackets, semicolons are not necessary.

• You can use any method as an infix operator "%d apples". Format (num) and "%d apples" format num are equivalent.

• Arithmetic operators like + and<< are treated just like any other methods since function names are allowed to consist of a sequence of arbitrary symbols; the only special treatments that such symbol-named methods undergo concerns the handling of precedence.

• You can use curly braces instead of parentheses in methods calls which allow pure library implementations of new control structures. The curly braces variant allows the expressions to span multiple lines.

• Method name should be ending in colon (:) except the argument on the left-hand side and the receiver on the right-hand side. Class body variables are transparently implemented as separate getter and setter methods.

• Methods apply and update have syntactic short forms .foo () where foo is a value (singleton object or class instance)-is short for.

• This is used for collection classes and extends too many other cases, such as STM cells.

• Scala distinguishes between no-parens (def foo=42) and empty-parens (def foo () =42) methods. While calling an empty parens method the parentheses may be omitted, which is useful when calling into Java libraries that do not know this distinction.

• For-expressions can accommodate any type that defines monadic methods such as map, flat Map, and filter.

• Your code is more concise, readable and error-free.

• It is easy to write, compile, debug and run the program when compared to many other programming languages.

• Functional programming lets you approach the same problem through a different angle.

• Deploy concurrency which helps in parallelizing the tasks.

• You can utilize a lot of third-party libraries for specific tasks. They can be added in the form of language constructs.

These choices collectively serve as the purpose of allowing domain-specific languages to be defined in Scala without needing to extend the compiler.

Real world scenarios of Scala

Writing web applications.

Applications working with streaming data.

Concurrency and Distributed applications.

Parallel batch processing.

Analyzing data with Apache Spark.

Scala is the fourth most demanded programming language in the world of technology. It is best-suited technology for aspiring software professionals, Data Scientists, Data Engineers, and Analytics Professionals.

It is not only an easy and less tedious programming language, but it is also widely used by some of the biggest companies like Twitter, LinkedIn, Netflix, etc., for implementing their platforms. And these companies have also contributed to the recent growth of Scala as a mainstream language.

Scala would be the perfect choice for you to improve your programming skills and get better career opportunities at the same time. The companies are passionately looking for professionals having a good command of this programming language, which signifies that numerous successful career opportunities are awaiting the aspirants wanting to make their careers in the big data world.