Saddle is a library for manipulating structured data. It is written in Scala and the authors claim that it is "the easiest and most expressive way to program with structured data on the JVM." It draws inspiration from and replicates a lot of the functionality of R and pandas Python library. It also occupies a similar niche in scientific computing as those two systems. In addition, it provides access to similar data structures to NumPy and Breeze (to represent matrices and vectors), that is you can use it to write numerical computing code as well.
While it can be used for various things, it is mostly used for data analysis, namely, for analyzing data arranged into a two-dimensional table with named columns and indexed rows. This type of structured data is probably familiar to you if you have ever done any kind of work in pattern recognition, data mining, and many other disciplines. Or, for that matter, if you have ever used spreadsheet software or...