The Scala Center

The Scala Center is an independent, not-for-profit center whose mission is to guide and support the Scala community, to coordinate and develop open source libraries and tools for the benefit of all Scala users and to provide high quality educational material.

The large user base and the diversity of projects built on Scala mean that there are many demands on the language and its tool set. There is also a large pool of capable and motivated contributors. The first mission of the Scala Center is to consult with the user community, define common goals, and organize contributions and its own resources to achieve these goals. The Scala Center is a designated unit at EPFL, independent from the Scala research group (LAMP).

The Scala Language

Scala is an acronym for “Scalable Language”. This means that Scala grows with you. At the root, the language’s scalability is the result of a careful integration of object-oriented and functional language concepts. Scala is the preferred workhorse language for many mission-critical server systems. The generated code is on a par with Java’s and its precise typing means that many problems are caught at compile-time rather than after deployment. Scala is the technology of choice for a vibrant open-source ecosystem, including popular platforms and frameworks such as Spark, Kafka, Akka, Finagle, Cats, and Play, to name just a few.

Scala is a pure-bred object-oriented language. Conceptually, every value is an object and every operation is a method call. The language supports advanced component architectures through classes and traits. Even though its syntax is fairly conventional, Scala is also a full-blown functional language. It has everything you would expect, including first-class functions, a library with efficient immutable data structures, and a general preference of immutability over mutation.