Scala, Scala, Everywhere

For legacy observations on Scala, check out JVM stuff.  Here we build a fresh relationship with Scala.

Scala is a strongly statically typed language supporting OOP and functional programming.  Strong static typing means it avoids implicit type conversions when calling functions and other scenarios.

A good starting point for learning Scala is scala.dev here.

Apache Spark (and its roots in Scala)

Apache Spark is a foundational layer underlying many data platforms. 

It is written both in Java and Scala. Read the source code here.

A good starting point is SparkSession.scala.

One of Spark's "selling points" is "Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) on petabyte-scale data without having to resort to downsampling" (see detailed post on downsampling). 

A petabyte (PB) holds 1000 terabytes (one thousand million million bytes).