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Before Scala, I have "mastered" until now Ruby, Python, Perl, PHP, Java, C# and Javascript as in I used them for real projects in production for at least 1.5 years each and whenever I learn a new language, I always go in depth. And I also played with half a dozen others. Scala is the language that helps you write better code. In the kinds of projects that I've been working for the last 3 years, requiring parallelism, efficient usage of resources, asynchronicity, redundancy, scalability, throughput, reliability on the whole, I can honestly say that none of the other languages could do a better job. On features, it actually doesn't have many, but the features that it does have are powerful enough that you can have bigger abstractions. For example, "async" is not a language feature such as in C#, but a library. Of course, there's much to learn, especially concepts that have been borrowed from Haskell or other FP languages with a Scala-ish twist, like persistent data-structures, type-classes, futures/promises, iteratees and in general, what's the deal with monads, monoids and applicative functors. In training beginners explaining these concepts was the most difficult part of the training, trumping all others considerations, starting from the basics like "don't use vars". Scala is difficult because it's a functional programming language, beautifully blended with OOP, being in fact a better OOP language than most mainstream OOP languages. Learning FP and then learning OOP in a way not exposed by languages like Java and then learning what good design looks like, grokking a lot of FP design patterns in the process, that can be very overwhelming. For any developer that is not familiar with a good FP language already, or that thinks OOP is what Java gives you, the transition can be pretty painful. On the other hand - I'm of the opinion that if learning a new language is not painful, then it doesn't give you anything of value, so learning it is pretty useless. |