What is Scala Language?
Scala is the functional and general-purpose programming language that represents the programming language in a very balanced, compact way. It can be easily combined with the features of functional as well as an object-oriented programming language. If a user has written a code in Scala then it can run on Java virtual machine as well and this way if a library is written in any of the languages Java or Scala, then it can be easily imported into Java which makes Scala a language interoperable. Scala provides very rich features of functional programming such as Standard ML and Haskell, including currying, pattern matching, and so on.
The demand for Scala is growing day by day and it is being used in many projects such as Apache Kafka, Apache Spark, Apache Flink, and so on. Scala is being called a new computation engine which is mainly based on the processing despite the batch size, also it can process live stream data.
The following are the most valued brands in the world using Scala in their business and changing the world.
1. PayPal
Paypal has recently developed a project called squbs which is based on Scala and Akka. It is used to handle over 1 billion transactions each day which a less infrastructure that provides a 10X better performance compared to the previous implementation of Spring/Java.
2. Barclays
Barclays is using Spark and Scala to resolve their day to day issues.
3. UniCredit
UniCredit uses Scala, Apache Spark, Akka to boost customer insight data very fast.
4. Hootsuite
Hootsuite uses the combination of Scala and Akka over PHP to make the concurrency trivial.
History of Scala Language
The following are the year by year evaluation of Scala programming language.
- 2001: Martin Odersky started the design of Scala.
- 2003: Initial version of Scala was released.
- 2004: Publicly, Scala was released on the Java Platform.
- 2006: Scala's second version was released.
- 2011: Typesafe Inc by launched by Martin Odersky to provide support of Scala.
- 2018: Scala's first stable version(2.12) was released.
Why Scala?
The following are some of the strong reasons to learn Scala.
1. Strong Community
Scala has a very strong and active community base that works round the clock to provide support and keep working on Scala enhancement. Scala community support is active on GiTHub as well with 12.7K Star and 2.9K fork as of 2020.
2. Object-oriented
Scala is a functional as well as an object-oriented language which indicates that each value is represented as an object and the classes will define the types and behaviors of each object.
3. Functional Language
Since Scala is a functional programming language hence each function is represented as a value. Scala shares the basic syntax to define the functions and allows function nesting. Scala provides built-in support to perform algebraic functions.
4. Extensible
Scala supports a very unique feature through which it can add new language set up in the form of libraries.
5. Interoperates
Scala is designed in such a way it can easily interoperate with the Java Runtime Environment (JRE). Scala also supports the new features of Java such as lambdas, SAMs, annotations, and so on.