Keyvan Nayyeri

Beginning my studies here in the US and for the first semester, I’m assigned a Teaching Assistant position for an undergraduate course on Programming Languages. One of the major goals of this course is to get students familiar with major features of different categories of programming languages as well as the differences in implementation of some basic features.

The instructor of the class, Dr. von Ronne, has decided to use Scala as the main programming language for projects defined for this class, and students are supposed to use this language to build an incremental project and compare the features of Scala with other languages taught in the class.

To get students started with the language I went over the principles of Scala and functional programming in two sessions at the beginning of the semester (back in mid-January).

As some of you may know, Scala is a programming language that combines the Object-Oriented and functional programming features  from the two major paradigms of programming languages (declarative and imperative), and was founded and released in 2003 by Martin Odersky, a German scientist. The name of the Scala language comes from Scalability and it truly delivers a high level of scalability. The language is designed to be expandable and flexible.

Scala has proven to be the best attempt in combining Object-Oriented and functional styles in a single programming language. The good point about Scala is that it doesn’t come as a completely new language and just tries to refine the Java platform or the .NET Framework. Scala is more known for its integration with Java and the .NET branch hasn’t been very active (most likely because F# has become the mainstream functional programming language for the Microsoft community). Scala has a compiler and an interpreter for Java and has a great set of features enhancing the functional programming style.

The other interesting point about Scala is that it derives many of its features from existing languages and tries to get the best out of the previous experiences.

I put all these introductory information in a set of slides for a short presentation in  to start the class. I thought that it may be helpful to published them here for those who may be interested to have a background in Scala. You can download the slides in the PDF format from here.

If you’re interested to learn the basics of Scala in a practical manner, Simply Scala is a great website to use with its tutorials, and if you’re looking to learn it in a more advanced level, Programming in Scala is a rich book written by some authors including Martin Ordersky, himself.