A (too) short introduction to Scala

May 21, 2015

scala design pattern presentation

I recently had an introductory talk on the Scala programming language. The audience of the seminar was mainly composed of students of the bachelor-level informatics curriculum at the University of Padova. These students had just learned to program in Java, to use UML notation and design patterns. So I thought: “Why don’t I propose to my students something alternative to Java. A language that interiorizes the best practices of programming of the last fifteen years. So, Why don’t I have a talk about Scala?”

And this is the story about how this introductory talk about Scala was born.

So, the aim of the talk was not to be a comprehensive presentation of the Scala programming language. The aim was to introduce the Scala language, putting a stress on the features that made it one of the heirs to the throne of programming.

In particular, the following concepts in the talks are presented:

• A brief history of the language
• Main syntax features
• Object oriented Scala (Classes, Objects, Abstract classes and Traits, Case classes and pattern matching, Generics, Implicits, Option[A], Tuple)
• Functional Scala (First class functions, Lambdas, Recursion, Currying, Call by name/value)

Using these concepts, I showed to my students how the language allows to implement natively some design pattern, such as:

• Singleton
• Factory method
• Null object
• Decorator (using mixins)
• Abstract factory
• Value object
• Adapter
• Strategy
• Command
• Template method

Let’s say that if you have a OO background and if you want to start to learn the Scala language, this talk could be a good starting point. But, if you want to go a little deeper, I suggest you this book:

Scala for the impatient, Cay Horstmann, Addison-Wesley 2012