Chapter 1. Scala—a blended language
In this chapter
- Short introduction to Scala
- Insights into Scala’s design
Scala was born from the mind of Martin Odersky, a man who had helped introduce generics into the Java programming language. Scala was an offshoot from the Funnel language, an attempt to combine functional programming and Petri nets. Scala was developed with the premise that you could mix together object orientation, functional programming, and a powerful type system and still keep elegant, succinct code. It was hoped that this blending of concepts would create something that real developers could use and that could be studied for new programming idioms. It was such a large success that industry has started adopting Scala as a viable and competitive language.
Understanding Scala requires understanding this mixture of concepts. Scala attempts to blend three dichotomies of thought into one language. These are:
- Functional programming and object-oriented programming
- Expressive syntax and static typing
- Advanced language features and rich Java integration
Functional programming is programming through the definition and composition of functions. Object-oriented programming is programming through the definition and composition of objects. In Scala, functions are objects. Programs can be constructed through both the definition and composition of objects or functions. This gives Scala the ability to focus on “nouns” or “verbs” in a program, depending on what is the most prominent.