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.