Scala is a functional programming language which is gaining popularity over past few years. There are some key benefits of using functional programming and this language in particular.
What is Scala?
As mentioned above it is a functional programming language which compiles the code into Java bytecode. Once compiled, this bytecode could be run on any JVM (Java Virtual Machine). Scala can directly use Java libraries as well as it’s own libraries. It is also known for statically typed nature. It simply means the code gets checked thoroughly during compile time itself for all the variables and their types. This helps in identifying bugs early on and reducing the issue identification during runtime.
Scala was first introduced in 2003 and was an attempt towards creating “Better Java”. As a result, it has features of OOP as well as functional programming built-in, making it very powerful language to use. It’s compiler has capabilities to infer quite a few things about the variables, functions, and classes. This, in turn, helps developers write very concise code.
Key Features
- Type inference
- Singleton Object
- Immutability
- Powerful Pattern Matching for switch/case statements
- Higher-order methods (methods that take methods as input)
- Traits (Improved version of Interfaces)
- Concurrency
This language has been considered as best language to support concurrency. It considers the availability of several cores such as in GPUs which can give you benefits of parallel execution.
Essentially, Scala can do everything Java can do and also in a better fashion!!
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Related Keywords
Functional Programming, Java, Big Data, Hadoop
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