Summarizing Improvements In Spark 2.4

Anmol Sarna summarizes Apache Spark 2.4 and pushes his meme game at the same time:

The next major enhancement was the addition of a lot of new built-in functions, including higher-order functions, to deal with complex data types easier.
Spark 2.4 introduced 24 new built-in functions, such as  array_union, array_max/min, etc., and 5 higher-order functions, such as transform, filter, etc.
The entire list can be found here.
Earlier, for manipulating the complex types (e.g. array type) directly, there are two typical solutions:
1) exploding the nested structure into individual rows, and applying some functions, and then creating the structure again.
2) building a User Defined Function (UDF).
In contrast, the new built-in functions can directly manipulate complex types, and the higher-order functions can manipulate complex values with an anonymous lambda function similar to UDFs but with much better performance.

2.4 was a big release, so check this out for a great summary of the improvements it brings.