As it says in the post, this is just the benchmark of a for loop, and the author rightly says that nothing can be inferred from it. When it comes to prototypin

As it says in the post, this is just the benchmark of a for loop, and the author rightly says that nothing can be inferred from it. When it comes to prototyping, using languages such as scala brings nothing for such type of mathematical algorithms as it is basically only loops and double operations. You are better off with languages such as R/scipy where most of the core is written in C/C++ and handily wrapped (there are many heavily optimized packages in R to do gradient descent). For production code, well, you know the correct solution ;)