Programming or coding is a word that you may have heard a lot, from children of all ages now, Once considered to be a very complex topic and only to accessed by professionals, most of us considered the term programming as a very complex set of tasks by watching all of the movies at our homes where every person who was supposed to code was sitting in front of a laptop with a green screen ans typing in a very anti-serif font, it looked cool to pursue, was engaging to the eye and looked savvy, most of the time the person behind the computer in the movie didn’t have any other job also just a laptop by his side which made him look some would argue a lot cooler than the main hero in the movie.
Programming has evolved and come a long way, a journey that was started a long time ago with the creation of C language in 1973, after that there has been a lot of programming languages which has come up with additional features and a lot easier to use UI. In the recent time Scala has been the new ‘trendy’ programming language that the developers have switched to. While Scala ranks lower than Java, ASP.NET, or PHP in terms of popularity and usage, according to W3Techs, its usage has grown steadily over the past year, from 1.3% in March 2019 to 1.6% in March 2020 (it was only 0.2% in 2015). This growth is a bit more than the one reported by languages like JavaScript or Python. Scala’s growth is directly tied to the high demand for big data projects and the software and people to run them. It is a language of choice when it comes to analyzing data using the popular Apache Spark, a leading cluster programming framework. Spark is used in Machine Learning and provides fast, easy-to-use, data analytics for enterprises. Companies like eBay, Netflix, Amazon, Alibaba, Yahoo, and Databricks use Apache Spark for business insights and for powering their customer-facing apps to do things like show recommendations in real time. Scala is detailed as "A pure-bred object-oriented language that runs on the JVM". Scala is an acronym for “Scalable Language”. This means that Scala grows with you. You can play with it by typing one-line expressions and observing the results. But you can also rely on it for large mission critical systems, as many companies, including Twitter, LinkedIn, or Intel do. To some, Scala feels like a scripting language. Its syntax is concise and low ceremony; its types get out of the way because the compiler can infer them.
Twitter is one of Scala’s biggest fans. Three of their developers have absolutely loved the language and have gone to great strengths to learn more about the language. Programmers love Scala because it has a robust assortment of developer tools and combines the strength of two different programming environments. The Scala Library Index (Scaladex) offers programmers a vast ecosystem of 175,000+ libraries. A smooth transition to functional programming is possible for programmers who are already proficient in Java.
Due to its high-level functionality, Scala may be a bit more difficult to learn than Python, another high-level language. When dealing with large, intensive data processes, Scala is preferred when performance, memory, and safety are key factors. Scala is ideal for large projects that you want to scale beautifully, while providing a high quality solution (hence its name).
Scala language was basically developed to address the criticisms of the Java language, Java as a language is very widely used everywhere from android applications to websites to you name it, you will find Java and it’s variables everywhere from frontend to backend but when it comes to functional programming it has it’s drawbacks, this is where scala comes into play. It can be used in the same functions and uses as Java. It runs on the java platform, and since Android applications are typically written in Java and then translated into Dalvik bytecode (which may be further translated into native machine code during installation), Scala's Java compatibility makes it well-suited to Android development.
The name scala is a combination of scalable and language that said it can be also be used in frontend and backend development of websites. Scala.js is a a Scala compiler that compiles to JavaScript, making it possible to write Scala programs that can run in web browsers or Node.js. The compiler, in development since 2013, was announced as no longer experimental in 2015 (v0.6). Version v1.0.0-M1 was released in June 2018 and version 1.1.1 in September 2020.
Java and Javascript have paved the way for languages like Scala to come up which has made the effort to code very easy and efficient. It has taken to cater the User Experience much more, in these programming languages there is sometime a huge need to write long lengths of code. Imagine you are writing a code for the backend development of a website using JavaScript and we being humans, can be the most intelligent and efficient of them all, we are bound to make some mistakes, leaving out a simple semicolon can ruin hours of code when it comes to compilation to minimize the percentage of that happening new languages have come up which have made the length of our code short and efficient.
Some of the features of Scala are useful in that aspect, with one of it’s best features being the ability of it’s syntax to be very flexible. This feature is called syntatic flexibility. For example; Semicolons are unnecessary; lines are automatically joined if they begin or end with a token that cannot normally come in this position, or if there are unclosed parentheses or brackets.
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