Scala: Guide for Data Science Professionals

When not to use Scala

In the previous sections, we described how Scala's strong type system, preference for immutability, functional capabilities, and parallelism abstractions make it easy to write reliable programs and minimize the risk of unexpected behavior.

What reasons might you have to avoid Scala in your next project? One important reason is familiarity. Scala introduces many concepts such as implicits, type classes, and composition using traits that might not be familiar to programmers coming from the object-oriented world. Scala's type system is very expressive, but getting to know it well enough to use its full power takes time and requires adjusting to a new programming paradigm. Finally, dealing with immutable data structures can feel ...