Book Image

Learning Scala Programming

By : Vikash Sharma
Book Image

Learning Scala Programming

By: Vikash Sharma

Overview of this book

Scala is a general-purpose programming language that supports both functional and object-oriented programming paradigms. Due to its concise design and versatility, Scala's applications have been extended to a wide variety of fields such as data science and cluster computing. You will learn to write highly scalable, concurrent, and testable programs to meet everyday software requirements. We will begin by understanding the language basics, syntax, core data types, literals, variables, and more. From here you will be introduced to data structures with Scala and you will learn to work with higher-order functions. Scala's powerful collections framework will help you get the best out of immutable data structures and utilize them effectively. You will then be introduced to concepts such as pattern matching, case classes, and functional programming features. From here, you will learn to work with Scala's object-oriented features. Going forward, you will learn about asynchronous and reactive programming with Scala, where you will be introduced to the Akka framework. Finally, you will learn the interoperability of Scala and Java. After reading this book, you'll be well versed with this language and its features, and you will be able to write scalable, concurrent, and reactive programs in Scala.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Linearization


The reason why multiple inheritances become a burden when we try to implement them is due to the diamond problem. Take a look at the following image:

Diamond problem

Here, suppose we have an abstract class named Language, that has a method named sayHello. Two traits, named British and Spanish, extend the abstract Language class and define their own implementation of the sayHello method. Then we create a trait, named Socializer, that mixes in the other two traits with a super call to the sayHello method implementation. Now, confusion occurs as to which implementation of sayHello is getting called when we invoke this method. The primary reason for this problem is there's no multiple inheritance in Java, but Scala supports a form of multiple inheritance through trait mix-in. The concept Scala uses to resolve the problem of super calls is linearization. Let's first code for the problem and see it's behavior, then we'll understand linearization and the rules that justify the behavior...