If you haven’t used Scala yet, you’re not the only one: Not even four percent of all programmers were using the language as of last year, according to StackOverflow. That puts it at rank 22 of the most-used languages, JavaScript and HTML being the top two.The programmers that use Scala, however, seem to profit from it. Not only does it rank at place 14 in StackOverflow’s most loved languages. This is significantly higher than the rank 22 of usage.And financially, knowing the language seems to pay off: Globally, only Perl programmers get a higher salary than Scala programmers, both landing at around $76 thousand per year. In the US, Scala takes the top spot in terms of salary, and programmers can expect to make about $150 thousand each year. Sounds okay to me!There are different reasons why some programming languages are more loved or more lucrative than others. In the case of Scala, the main reason is that it makes it quite easy for programmers to learn functional programming, without giving up on known-and-loved paradigms like object-oriented programming.Functional programming has been gaining traction in the past few years because it’s very apt for processing big data volumes, implementing machine learning algorithms, and more. As such technologies scale very well, investing in them has been bringing revenue in companies of uncountable sectors. That’s why high salaries for Scala-programmers are justified.

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