December 21, 2019

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Scala: Why hasn't an official Scala kernel for Jupyter emerged yet?

Scala: Why hasn't an official Scala kernel for Jupyter emerged yet?

Alexandre Archambault explores why an official Scala kernel for Jupyter has yet to emerge. Part of the answer lies in the fact that there is no user-friendly, easy-to-use Scala shell in the console (i.e., no IPython for Scala). But there's a new contender, Ammonitealthough it still has to overcome a few challenges, not least being supporting by big data frameworks like Spark, Scio, and Scalding.

Talk Title Scala: Why hasn't an official Scala kernel for Jupyter emerged yet?
Speakers Alexandre Archambault (Teads.tv)
Conference JupyterCon in New York 2017
Conf Tag
Location New York, New York
Date August 23-25, 2017
URL Talk Page
Slides Talk Slides
Video

Alexandre Archambault explores why an official Scala kernel for Jupyter has yet to emerge. Part of the answer lies in the fact that there is no user-friendly, easy-to-use Scala shell in the console (i.e., no IPython for Scala). But there’s a new contender, Ammonite—although it still has to overcome a few challenges, not least being supporting by big data frameworks like Spark, Scio, and Scalding. Alexandre reviews the challenges it has to overcome to become a full-fledged Scala shell and offers a tour of some very Scala- or JVM-specific features, such as the convenient way dependencies are managed (no virtualenv on the JVM!) and how it allows sending objects over the wire for distributed calculations (compiler-generated objects in particular, which Spark heavily relies on). Alexandre illustrates these points with jupyter-scala, a Scala kernel for Jupyter (which rests on a fork of Ammonite) that tries to address these challenges.

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