Scala Tutorial: Scala code and the Scala interpreter

Want to learn more? Take the full course at https://learn.datacamp.com/courses/introduction-to-scala at your own pace. More than a video, you'll learn hands-on coding & quickly apply skills to your daily work. --- So, Scala's exciting. We answered the "What" question quickly before. Let's dive deeper to find more answers to "Why use Scala?" Here's the first thing on Scala's official website. Pause the video and read through it. If that made your brain hurt, don't worry. Let's break it down. Scala fuses object-oriented and functional programming concepts more than any other language in the world. This fusion is what contributes the most to the scalability of the language according Martin Odersky, creator of Scala. Scala is object-oriented because every value is an object and every operation is a method call. You can write 2 plus 4 like this to get 6. Behind the scenes, Scala rewrites it, with the method plus being called on the object 2. Rule of thumb to remember: pretty much everything is an object in Scala. This feature impacts scalability profoundly. Scala is also a functional programming language, which is impossible to fully describe in one slide. For now, remember two things. First, in Scala, functions are first-class values, just like integers or strings. You can pass them as arguments to other functions, return them from functions, store them in variables, and more. This is not the case in all languages. Second, operations of a program should map input values to output values rather than change data in place. Another way of saying this is functions should not have side effects. This may be a little confusing now and that's okay. Beyond scalability, there are more answers to "Why use Scala?" Here's the shortlist. Don't worry if some of the next few concepts don't make full sense to you yet. Scala is concise. Scala programs tend to be short, often down to one tenth of the number of lines compared to Java programs. Scala is high-level, which means y