Hello there! Today is significant as we embark on the journey of learning Scala: a versatile, functional, and object-oriented programming language that is renowned in various areas such as web development and big data analytics. This lesson will equip you with the fundamentals of Scala, including understanding its syntax, exploring the concept of comments, and crafting your first print statement — crucial stepping stones for understanding and mastering the Scala language.

Understanding the syntax is the primary step towards learning a programming language. Syntax can be defined as the set of rules and conventions for writing programs. For instance, consider this simple Scala statement:

println is a built-in Scala function that prints the argument (or message) passed to it. In our case, the argument happens to be the string "Hello, World!". The message you put in the println function should be in double quotes. If you write more than one println function, each message will be printed on a new line:

The output of the above code will be:

Comments serve an important function in improving the readability and understandability of your code. Importantly, comments hold no relevance or impact on the code execution. Scala provides support for both single-line and multi-line comments.