Scala is a popular general-purpose, high-level programming language that typically runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). JVM is a time-tested platform that has proven itself in terms of stability and performance. A large number of very powerful libraries and frameworks have been built using Java. For instance, in the context of data analysis, there are many Java libraries available to handle different data formats, such as XML, JSON, Avro, and so on. Scala's interoperability with such well-tested libraries helps increase a Scala programmer's productivity greatly.
When it comes to data analysis and processing, it is often the case that there is an abundance of data transformation tasks that need to be performed. Some examples of such tasks are mapping from one representation to another, filtering irrelevant data, and joining one set of data with another...