Scala Italy 2018

After sponsoring Scala Days 2018 in Berlin and Scala Days 2018 in NewYork, our commitment to supporting Scala language goes on. Also this year Bitrock will be sponsor at Scala Italy 2018, the Italian Conference on Scala, taking place in Florence, September 14th-15th.

Scala combines object-oriented and functional programming in one concise, high-level language. Scala’s static types help avoid bugs in complex applications, and its JVM and JavaScript runtimes let you build high-performance systems with easy access to huge ecosystems of libraries.

Scala is a pure object-oriented language in the sense that every value is an object. Types and behavior of objects are described by classes and traits. Classes are extended by subclassing and a flexible mixin-based composition mechanism as a clean replacement for multiple inheritance.

Scala is also a functional language in the sense that every function is a value. Scala provides a lightweight syntax for defining anonymous functions, it supports higher-order functions, it allows functions to be nested, and supports currying. Scala’s case classes and its built-in support for pattern matching model algebraic types used in many functional programming languages. Singleton objects provide a convenient way to group functions that aren’t members of a class.

Furthermore, Scala’s notion of pattern matching naturally extends to the processing of XML data with the help of right-ignoring sequence patterns, by way of general extension via extractor objects. In this context, for comprehensions are useful for formulating queries. These features make Scala ideal for developing applications like web services.

Scala is equipped with an expressive type system that enforces statically that abstractions are used in a safe and coherent manner. In particular, the type system supports:

• generic classes
• variance annotations
• upper and lower type bounds,
• inner classes and abstract types as object members
• compound types* explicitly typed self references
• implicit parameters and conversions
• polymorphic methods

Type inference means the user is not required to annotate code with redundant type information. In combination, these features provide a powerful basis for the safe reuse of programming abstractions and for the type-safe extension of software.

In practice, the development of domain-specific applications often requires domain-specific language extensions. Scala provides a unique combination of language mechanisms that make it easy to smoothly add new language constructs in the form of libraries.

In many cases, this can be done without using meta-programming facilities such as macros. For example,

• Implicit classes allow adding extension methods to existing types.
• String interpolation is user-extensible with custom interpolators.

Scala is designed to interoperate well with the popular Java Runtime Environment (JRE). In particular, the interaction with the mainstream object-oriented Java programming language is as smooth as possible. Newer Java features like SAMs, lambdas, annotations, and generics have direct analogues in Scala.

Those Scala features without Java analogues, such as default and named parameters, compile as close to Java as they can reasonably come. Scala has the same compilation model (separate compilation, dynamic class loading) like Java and allows access to thousands of existing high-quality libraries.