Spark - The Ultimate Scala Collections

In his inaugural Big Data Scala keynote, Martin Odersky, the creator of Scala, shows how Spark is a logical extension of Scala collections, and in fact a DSL for distributed processing. Scala was created as a scalable language, and Spark is a great case in point.

Martin is a German computer scientist and professor of programming methods at EPFL in Switzerland. He specializes in code analysis and programming languages. He designed the Scala programming language and Generic Java, and built the current generation of javac, the Java compiler. In 2007 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. In 1989, he received his Ph.D. from ETH Zurich under the supervision of Niklaus Wirth, who is best known as the designer of several programming languages (including Pascal). He did postdoctoral work at IBM and Yale. In 2011, Martin founded Typesafe Inc., a company to support and promote Scala, and he currently serves as the chairman and chief architect. Martin teaches two courses on the massive open online course provider, Coursera, namely Functional Programming Principles in Scala and Principles of Reactive Programming.