Scala integrates seamlessly with the big data ecosystem, which is considerably based on Java. A quick look at the salaries offered by Python and Scala skills shows that Scala as a skill offers more salary in the job market than Python. While many other modern programming languages are dynamically typed, Scala type-checks at compile-time, which means that many trivial but costly bugs can be detected at compile-time and not in production. Scala is a fully-fledged OOP language, and it is possible to write very elegant and expressive programs without even touching their functional attributes.
There is a growing demand for Scala developers because big data companies value developers who can master a productive and robust programming language for data analysis and processing in Apache Spark. If Scala is your first entry into the world of coding, then you will find a great set of materials and even online courses that explain Scala for beginners. In Scala, this is achieved with syntactic sugar and objects that extend features (such as Function , but this is how functional programming is achieved in Scala. However, when there is significant processing logic, performance is an important factor and Scala definitely offers better performance than Python, for programming against Spark.
Learning Scala enriches a programmer's knowledge of several novel abstractions in the type system, novel functional programming features and immutable data. Scala allows developers to write efficient, readable and maintainable services without hanging program code in an unreadable web of call-backs. Refactoring program code from a statically typed language like Scala is much easier and uncomplicated than refactoring code from a dynamic language like Python. Reports have also shown that Scala is securing the 30th position in the list of top 50 trendy programming languages.
Throughout this chapter, you have learned the basics of the Scala programming language, its features and the available editor. Data scientists often prefer to learn both Scala for Spark and Python for Spark, but Python is often the second favourite language for Apache Spark, as Scala came first. Some programs in other languages will take dozens of lines to code, but in Scala, you get the power to express general programming patterns and concepts in a concise and effective way. Scala does not support direct multiple inheritance, but to achieve this structure, it is necessary to use Scala's extension of subclass-based composition and mixins.
Scala was developed to allow common programming patterns to be expressed in a concise and type-safe format.
