Scala and Other Languages

Scala has drawn a good number of features from other languages, most notably Erlang. The actor-based concurrency in Scala was inspired by the success of that model in Erlang. Likewise, static typing and type inference in Scala was influenced by languages like Haskell. Functional style capabilities came from several languages that came before.

With the introduction of lambda expressions and the powerful streams API in Java 8 (see Functional Programming in Java: Harnessing the Power of Java 8 Lambda Expressions [Sub14]) we can write functional style code in Java. This is not a threat to Scala or any of the other languages on the JVM; instead it closes the gap between these languages, making it less difficult for programmers to adopt or switch between languages.

Scala nicely fits into the Java ecosystem, and we can readily use Java libraries from Scala. We can build full applications entirely in Scala or intermix it with Java and other languages on the JVM. So, Scala code could be as small as a script or as large as a full-fledged enterprise application.