Curry On
Amsterdam!
July 16-17th, 2018


ApacheSpark as a gateway drug to FP: Concepts taught & broken
Holden Karau
Google


Abstract

Apache Spark has driven a lot of adoption of both Scala and functional programming concepts in non-traditionally industries. For many programmers in the big data world they coming looking for a solution to scaling their code, and quickly find themselves dealing with immutable data structures and lambdas, and those who love it stay. However, there is a dark side (of escape), much of Spark’s functional programming is changing, and even though it encourages functional programming it’s in a variety of languages with different expectations (in-line XML as a valid part of your language is fun!). This talk will look at how Spark does a good job of introduce folks to concepts like immutability, but also places where we maybe don’t do a great job of setting up developers for a life of functional programming. Things like accumulators, our three different models for streaming data, and an “interesting” approach to closures (come to find out what the ClosuerCleaner does, stay to find out why). The talk will close out with a look at how the functional inspired API is in exposed in the different languages, and how this impacts the kind of code written (Scala, Java, and Python – other languages are supported by Spark but I don’t want to re-learn Javascript or learn R just for this talk). Pictures of cute animals will be included in the slides to distract from the sad parts.

Bio

Holden Karau is transgender Canadian, and an active open source contributor. When not in San Francisco working as a software development engineer at IBM’s Spark Technology Center, Holden talks internationally on Apache Spark and holds office hours at coffee shops at home and abroad. She is a Spark committer with frequent contributions, specializing in PySpark and Machine Learning. Prior to IBM she worked on a variety of distributed, search, and classification problems at Alpine, Databricks, Google, Foursquare, and Amazon. She graduated from the University of Waterloo with a Bachelor of Mathematics in Computer Science. Outside of software she enjoys playing with fire, welding, scooters, poutine, and dancing.