Scala (and Apache Spark) have become popular choices across several organizations specializing in genomic data analysis.

I’ll discuss one, the Parallel Genomic Analysis Toolkit (Pageant; https://github.com/hammerlab/pageant), including:

• its incorporation of increasingly complex Scala features/paradigms (typelevel libraries, macros, etc.),
• its unusual and modularity-oriented project-management, build, and release processes, and
• reflections on Scala’s strengths and weaknesses in the bioinformatics arena.

No prior genomics-domain knowledge is required.