In reality my function would rarely exist in the Scala world since having a weakly-typed return like that is cringeworthy to say the least. But it's better to see this in action with Scala options.

  val myOptionalVar: Option[String] = functionThatReturnsOption()

  myOptionalVar match {
    case Some(str) if str.length > 10 => System.out.println("This is a long string.")
    case Some(str) => System.out.println("This is a short string.")
    case None => System.out.println("This code would be fifteen lines of null checking in Java.")
  }