Therefore, many, if not most, data engineers adopting Spark are also adopting Scala, while Python and R remain popular among data scientists. Fortunately, it is not necessary to master Scala to use Spark effectively. All these statistical reports show how Scala programming is becoming the choice for Apache Spark to make data analysis faster. With support for multiple programming languages such as Java, Python, R and Scala in Spark - it often becomes difficult for developers to decide which language to choose when working on a Spark project.
With the advent of several big data frameworks such as Apache Kafka and Apache Spark, the Scala programming language has gained prominence among big data developers. Scala is a powerful programming language that offers developer-friendly features that are not available in Python. The hands-on experience in working with Scala for Spark projects is an added advantage for developers who want to enjoy programming on Apache Spark without hassle. The Scala programming language, developed by the founder of Typesafe, provides the confidence to design, develop, code and deploy things the right way making the best use of the capabilities provided by Spark and other big data technologies.
Saddle is the data library supported by Scala programming that provides a solid foundation for data manipulation through 2D data structures, robustness to missing values, array support and automatic data alignment. Scala is also ideal for low-level Spark programming and for easy navigation directly to the underlying source code. With support for immutable data structures, for-comprehensions, immutably named values, Scala provides remarkable support for functional programming. Many organisations favour the speed and simplicity of Spark, which supports many application programming interfaces (APIs) available from languages such as Java, R, Python and Scala.
The biggest names in the digital economy are investing in Scala programming for big data processing - Kafka created by LinkedIn and Scalding created by Twitter. You will master the essential skills of the open source framework Apache Spark and the Scala programming language. You will be able to use basic Scala programming functions with the IntelliJ IDE and get useful features such as type hints and compile-time checks for free. Scala is a compiler-based language, which makes the execution of Scala very fast compared to Python (which is an interpreted language).
I'm working on a project called bebe that will hopefully provide the community with a high-performance, type-safe Scala programming interface. The rule of thumb here is that by using Scala or Python - developers can write the most concise code and by using Java or Scala they can achieve the best runtime performance.
