Noelia Senior Project Blog - Welcome To My Blog! First Post

Why would you want to learn Scala?

Why don’t you just continue with the same languages you’ve been using for all your programming?

The goal of this is to encourage you to consider learning the Scala Programming language My audience is targeted towards college students

Why Scala For Me

As I have been researching on why Scala would be a beneficial tool for you to use, I have learned that larger companies use this as they have more benefits than others.

I went to a Disney informational session in my third year in college to learn about what they are looking for for programming candidates. The speaker said that if we want to stand out among other candidates, Scala is the perfect lanaguge to learn. He did say that there is a huge learning curve.

Companies That Use Scala and Examples of their projects with Pictures

Scala is used a lot by companies involved with Big Data (because they use Spark).

~Apple Scala was the top 4th used programming language used in their company. In fact, senior data scientists used Scala in Apple more in comparison to other positions.

It was relevant in their senior data science positions.

~Disney Streaming Software Engineer

Senior Data Scientist

A man, Manpreet Singh, looked at all the job postings for Disney in 2021, and he found the most popular programming languages were: Scala, Python, SQL, R.

Scala was at the top.

https://preettheman.medium.com/these-are-the-programming-languages-disney-uses-70c01cbf06be

~Twitter

This company is one of the commonly known companies to use Scala. They were also the earliest to use it, back in 2009. They did use Ruby, another programming language _________, but Twitter found out that Ruby lacks reliable, high performance code.

Scala has been beneficial and faster because it is less typing, and leads to less reading.

In fact, Twitter has started series for their programmers to be experienced in Scala

https://www.artima.com/articles/twitter-on-scala https://twitter.github.io/scala_school/

~Morgan Stanley It is a given that the industries that are wanting tech people are banks and financial instituations. Morgan Stanley is at the top of the banks that use Scala.

“Morgan Stanley has one of the world’s largest Scala codebases in production”

https://skillsmatter.com/partners/499-morgan-stanley

~The Guardian

We’ve found that Scala has enabled us to deliver things faster with less code. It’s reinvigorated the team. We’ll continue to use the right tool for the job whether that be Scala, Python, .NET, PHP or Bash. In the last six months, all of the new JVM-based projects have used Scala and none have selected Java.

https://www.infoq.com/articles/guardian_scala/

What Type of Projects is Scala Known For? 3 I will Focus On in Further Posts

~Big Data Processing, Data Science and Machine Learning, Financial Services

Basics of Scala Against Python

Simple Expression Example

Scala


object ScalaLoopExample {
  def main(args: Array[String]): Unit = {
    for (i <- 1 to 5) {
      println(s"Scala loop iteration: $i")
    }
  }
}

args: Array[String] is the method parameter declaration. It’s specifying that the main method takes an array of strings as its input.

Python

First Example:

for i in range(1, 6):
    print(f"Python loop iteration: {i}")

Second:

def simple_loop():
    # Function
    for i in range(1, 6):
        print(f"Python loop iteration: {i}")

# Call
simple_loop()

Python loop iteration: 1
Python loop iteration: 2
Python loop iteration: 3
Python loop iteration: 4
Python loop iteration: 5

In Scala, the for loop is more expressive and can be used for a variety of iteration scenarios, including iterating over collections and applying filters.

In Python, the for loop is straightforward and commonly used for iterating over sequences.

Variables Example

Scala

object ScalaVariablesExample {
  def main(args: Array[String]): Unit = {
    #variable with the keyword var
    var message: String = "Hi, all!"

    #Print the initial value
    println(message)
  }
}

var is used to declare a mutable variable named message of type String.

Python


def variable_example():
    # Defining the variable
    message = "Hi to all!"

    # Print
    print(message)

# Calling
variable_example()

Simple data analytics code

Scala

     
      * Calculate the average of all columns
      val avgDF = df.agg(avg(df.columns.map(col): _*))

      * Show the average values
      println("\nAverage Values:")
      avgDF.show()

Python

    # Calculate the average of all columns
    avg_series = df.mean()

    #printing it
    print(avg_series)

Concatenating Arrays

Scala

object ConcatenateArraysExample {
  def main(args: Array[String]): Unit = {
    # Define two arrays
    val array1 = Array(1, 2, 3)
    val array2 = Array(4, 5, 6)

    # Concatenate arrays using the ++ operator
    val concatenatedArray1 = array1 ++ array2

    # Concatenate arrays using the concat method
    val concatenatedArray2 = array1.concat(array2)

    # Print the results
    println("Concatenated Array 1: " + concatenatedArray1.mkString(", "))
    println("Concatenated Array 2: " + concatenatedArray2.mkString(", "))
  }
}

Python

def concatenate_arrays(*arrays):
    # Using the + operator for concatenation
    concatenated_array = []
    for arr in arrays:
        concatenated_array += arr

    return concatenated_array

def main():
    # Define several arrays
    array1 = [1, 2, 3]
    array2 = [4, 5, 6]
    array3 = ["A", "B", "C"]

    # Concatenate arrays using the custom function
    concatenated_array = concatenate_arrays(array1, array2, array3)

    # Print the result
    print("Concatenated Array:", concatenated_array)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

Concatenated Array: [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 'A', 'B', 'C']

~Key Points of Comparison