Can anyone explain in less than ten words why one should learn Scala in 2013?
More than 10: http://www.quora.com/Startups/What-startups-or-tech-companie...
Getting hired by any of these companies can be a good enough reason for some.
- If you're average or below average developer: the language does not matter. Focus on algorithms and read other people's code a lot.
- If you are using anything other than Java: consider testing Scala ( * ). You might learn great new ways of writing code, especially if you never used Functional Programming before.
- If you're above average developer programming in Java: you have to learn Scala now! Soon having "Java" on your resume without "Scala" will suggest "this person's skills are outdated" or "this is a junior developer".
( * ) I just put together a small starter project, no dependencies: https://github.com/csoma/Scala-starter
It's just for convenience: it will automatically install Java, Scala and dependencies. Run it and you don't have to hunt down anything from the web.
If you have SBT already installed (with homebrew, MSI, apt-get etc), you don't need that file at all.
Main.scala is a "println", Build.scala sets some compiler flags and project name - this is all.
About "Unit": Scala is strongly typed. In exchange you will not have run-time type errors and also you don't need type checking unit tests.
Java and Scala have essentially the same bytecode output as both compilers were written by Martin Odersky.
There are many links below: free books, PDFs, articles, videos, tutorials.
Or just Google "The busy Java developer's guide to Scala" (article), "Scala for the impatient" (PDF), "A Tour of Scala", "An Introduction to Scala for Java Developers" (about REPL) etc.