The Origins of Scala (2009)
12 days ago
- #functional-programming
- #scala
- #programming-languages
- Martin Odersky, creator of Scala, shares his journey into programming languages, starting with his interest in compilers during his undergraduate years.
- Odersky and a colleague developed a Modula-2 compiler for 8-bit Z80 computers, which was later acquired by Borland but remained obscure due to lack of marketing.
- Odersky's academic path led him to work with Niklaus Wirth and later focus on functional programming, influencing his future work on Scala.
- The development of Scala was influenced by Odersky's earlier projects, Pizza and GJ (Generic Java), which introduced functional programming concepts to the Java platform.
- Scala was designed to be a practical and advanced language, balancing academic purity with pragmatism, and was first released in 2003.
- Odersky discusses the challenges of Java's design decisions, such as covariant arrays, and how Scala was able to avoid these pitfalls by not being source compatible with Java.