Duck typing

A significant part of the work of a developer is to minimize the amount of code duplication. There are multiple different approaches to do this, including inheritance, abstraction, generics, type classes, and so on. There are cases, however, where strongly typed languages will require some extra work in order to minimize some of the duplication. Let's imagine that we have a method that can read and print the contents of a file. If we have two different libraries that allow us to read a file, in order to use our method, we will have to make sure the methods that read the file somehow become the same type. One way would be by wrapping them in a class that implements a specific interface. Provided that in both the libraries the read method has the same signature, which could easily happen, Scala can use duck typing instead, and this way it will minimize the extra work we will have to do.

Note

Duck typing is a term that comes from dynamic languages and it allows us to treat different...