An Introduction to Scala for Spark programming Nastaran Fatemi Slides of this course are prepared based on the book “Programming in Scala” and its presentations by Martin Odersky What’s Scala Scala is a statically typed, object-oriented programming language that blends imperative and functional programming styles. It is designed to integrate easily with applications that run on modern virtual machines, primarily the Java virtual machine (JVM). Scala was developed starting in 2003 by Martin Odersky's group at EPFL. It is used for big-iron projects in industry. 2 3 Some adoption vectors: Web platforms • Trading platforms Financial modeling Simulation Big Data Analytics Fast to first product, scalable afterwards 4 Scala is a Unifier Agile, with lightweight syntax Parallel Object-Oriented Scala Functional Sequential Safe and performant, with strong static typing 5 “If I were to pick a language to use today other than Java, it would be Scala.” James Gosling, creator of Java “Scala, it must be stated, is the current heir apparent to the Java throne. No other language on the JVM seems as capable of being a "replacement for Java" as Scala, and the momentum behind Scala is now unquestionable. While Scala is not a dynamic language, it has many of the characteristics of popular dynamic languages, through its rich and flexible type system, its sparse and clean syntax, and its marriage of functional and object paradigms.” Charles Nutter, creator of JRuby “I can honestly say if someone had shown me the Programming in Scala book by Martin Odersky, Lex Spoon & Bill Venners back in 2003 I'd probably have never created Groovy.” James Strachan, creator of Groovy. 6 What makes Scala scalable? Many factors: strong typing, inference, little boilerplate,… But mainly, its tight integration of functional and object-oriented programming Functional programming: Object-oriented programming: Makes it easy to build interesting things fro