Scala

A fashionable JVM language with support for fashionable distributed computation methods.

Darren Wilkinson’s A quick introduction to Apache Spark for statisticians, following on from his Scala for statistics manifesto.

See also Darren’s scala course.

For heavy statistics, one purportedly uses Breeze, which is part of ScalaNLP, a machine-learning project focussed on NLP.

I am unlikely to ever touch these tools at this stage.