Scala is a modern multi-paradigm programming language designed to express common programming patterns in a concise, elegant, and type-safe way. Scala has been created by Martin Odersky and he released the first version in 2003. Scala smoothly integrates the features of object-oriented and functional programming languages. This tutorial explains the basics of Scala in a simple and reader-friendly way.
Why Scala is getting popular?
- Developers wanted to have more flexible languages to improve their productivity which led to the evolution of scripting languages, like Python, Ruby and many more.
- Scala also provides REPL Shell ( Read, Evaluate, Print and Loop ) and its the easiest way to start working with Scala.
- Another benefit of using Scala is that It runs on top of JVM (Java Virtual Machine).
- The optimizations performed by today’s JVM are extraordinary, allowing byte code to outperform natively compiled code in many scenarios.
Scala REPL seems to be an interpreter but it is not. The typed code is compiled into a bytecode and then executed in JVM. Since it’s a compiled language, in the performance stack also it is better than its distant cousins Ruby, Python, etc.
” If I were to pick a language to use today other than Java, it would be Scala.” 
