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. Scala also offers closures, a feature that dynamic languages like Python and Ruby have adopted from the functional programming paradigm. Scala enough to give you a preview of Scala's power and capabilities and whet your appetite to learn the language. 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.
You will master the essential skills of the open source Apache Spark framework and the Scala programming language. The more you write in Scala, the more you'll need to adopt a Scala style if you're also reading things to learn what the standard Scala style is. In my opinion, for Scala to grow as the real alternative to Java, given that Java 8 also has functional programming support, it has to attract more and more Java developers. One thing you may not know about Scala is that it was originally developed at the Swiss university EPFL in an attempt to apply recent innovations in programming language research to a language that can gain traction in the mainstream, similar to Java.
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. Scala is a type-safe JVM language that incorporates both object-oriented and functional programming in an extremely concise, logical and extraordinarily powerful language. With support for immutable data structures, for-comprehensions, immutably named values - Scala provides remarkable support for functional programming. For a Java developer, learning a classical functional programming language like Haskell or OCaml is much more difficult than Scala.
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. In addition to this, taking a functional programming language like Scala will help shape the way you look at the concepts of data mutability, higher-order functions and side effects, not just as new ideas, but how they apply to your current coding work and designs. Scala has come a long way from its humble origins at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, but with the fusion of functional and object-oriented programming continuing to gain traction in cutting-edge companies and start-ups, there's no better time than now to stop tinkering with code snippets and start mastering the fundamentals.
