KeystoneML
Declarative Machine Learning
SQL is referred to as a declarative language as opposed to an imperative language like the 3GL's. You give it a high-level goal, and it figures out which machine learning algorithm to use, and tunes the hyperparameters for you. Are there other declarative machine learning systems out there? Their purpose is to allow non-Spark developers to write machine learning programs in languages they are comfortable in (like Python), yet be able to compile down to Spark Scala when the time comes to deploy to production.