What is Scala?
It is programming language developed by Martin Oderskey in 2001. It is an objected oriented programming language. Scala was developed with the influence of java hence it is very much similar to java and it also executes on Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Scala's code is first compiled by Scala compiler which creates a byte code and that byte code is transported to JVM later. But yet it differs from java as it is a scalable language that has clean, scalable and concised codes. It can handle large-scale data processing.
Some Features of Scala
1) Type Inference - There is no need to mention the return type of function and data type explicitly because scala can automatically deduce the type of data.
2) Immutability - Which means you can’t change the value of variable once assigned but if you want a mutable variable you can also create mutable variable which can be changed
3) Lazy Evaluation - Scala doesn't evaluates expression when it is not required hence it increases the performance
4) Higher order function - A function can take another function as an input or argument and return an output as a function.
Scala in Data Science
Scala allows you to store data in distributed manner and provides resources for parallel data processing. The language allows you to take advantage of big data processing. The most popular big data processing framework written by Scala is apache Spark. It is used as real time data streaming in apache Spark. In data analytics, the Spark Framework makes use of Scala. Apache Spark MLlib and ML are the libraries for Machine Learning tasks.
