No language is perfect for all use cases, but Scala brings many advantages. It is easy to write, compile, debug and run the program in Scala, compared to many other programming languages. Even based on this admittedly unscientific approach, Scala seems to be the only production-proven programming language that makes engineers happy and alleviates their need to curse more widely adopted languages like Java, PHP and JavaScript. Scala enough to give you a preview of Scala's power and capabilities and whet your appetite to learn the language.
In terms of programming paradigms, Scala inherits the object-oriented model from Java and extends it in several ways. Scala has outperformed several programming languages that tried to compete with Java and all have failed. While it supports all the object-oriented features available in Java (and in fact, augments them in a number of ways), Scala also provides a large number of capabilities normally found only in functional programming languages. As a result, there are certainly code distinctions and paradigm shifts that can make early learning to program in Scala a bit more difficult, but the result is a much cleaner and well-organised language that is ultimately easier to use and increases productivity.
Some of the more complex features of the language (tuples, functions, macros, to name a few) ultimately make it easier for the developer to write better code and increase performance when programming in Scala. Unlike Java, Scala has many features of functional programming languages such as Scheme, Standard ML and Haskell, including currying, immutability, lazy evaluation and pattern matching. Scala Native is a Scala compiler that targets the LLVM compiler infrastructure to create executable code that uses a lightweight managed runtime, which uses the Boehm rubbish collector. The popularity and use of Scala is growing rapidly, as evidenced by the increasing number of vacancies for Scala developers.
Scala also has many facilities for functional programming, including features found in advanced functional languages such as Haskell, and tries to be agnostic between the two paradigms, leaving the developer to choose between the two paradigms or, more often, some combination of them. Scala offers clean code, advanced features, functional and object-oriented programming in an open source package that takes advantage of the Java environment. The name Scala is a blend of two words, Scalable and language, representing that Scala is scalable and designed to grow with users' needs. Scala is a type-safe JVM language that incorporates both object-oriented and functional programming in an extremely concise, logical and extraordinarily powerful language.
Yes, it may seem more complex to the Scala novice, but once you fully understand the concepts behind it, Scala code will seem much simpler than Java code. For Scala contributions, discussions on the evolution of the language, the standard library, discussions on the evolution of the Scala platform and more.
