Scala and Spark for Big Data Analytics

Introduction to functional programming

In computer science, functional programming (FP) is a programming paradigm and a unique style of building the structure and elements of computer programs. This uniqueness helps treat the computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions and avoids changing-state and mutable data. Thus, by using the FP concept, you can learn to code in your own style that ensures the immutability of your data. In other words, FP is about writing pure functions, about removing hidden inputs and outputs as far as we can, so that as much of our code as possible just describes a relationship between inputs and outputs.

This is not a new concept but the Lambda Calculus, which provides the basis of FP, was first introduced ...