Foreword

I often find myself, both professionaly and otherwise, having to explain bits of Scala to newcomers to the language (but usually not new to programming).

Something that’s becoming increasingly obvious is that Scala developers follow a certain set of unspoken rules without really thinking about them, and never really explain them to beginners. This is not helping Scala’s reputation as a hard to learn language, which is unfortunate - it’s a language I enjoy and wish more people would learn.

This site is meant to address that, by listing and explaining all these rules I wish someone’d told me about when I was learning the language.

Comments, suggestions, … are welcome! I’m clearly not the best Scala developer out there and might have gotten things wrong, or right for the wrong reasons. If you see areas that could be improved on, feel free to open an issue!

Table of Contents

Warming up

Tricky behaviours

Unsafe patterns

Partial functions

Binary compatibility

Referential transparency

ADTs

OOP