The Origins of Scala (2009)

Summary

The Origins of Scala A Conversation with Martin Odersky, Part I by Bill Venners and Frank Sommers May 4, 2009 Summary Martin Odersky talks with Bill Venners about the history that led to the creation of the Scala programming language. Scala, a general-purpose, object-oriented, functional language for the JVM, is the brainchild of Martin Odersky, a professor at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). In the first part of a multi-part interview series, Martin Odersky discusses Scala's history and origins with Artima's Bill Venners. Discovering a fascination with compilers Bill Venners: Let's start at the beginning. How did you first become involved with programming languages? Martin Odersky: My favorite subject was always compilers and programming languages. When I first discovered what a compiler was, as an undergrad in 1980, I immediately wanted to build one. The only computer I could remotely afford at the time would have been a Sinclair ZX 80 which had one kilobyte of RAM. I was very close to giving it a try, but, fortunately, soon after got access to a much more powerful machine, an Osborne-1. It was the world's first “portable” (meaning luggable) computer, and it looked remotely like a sewing machine tilted by 90 degrees. It had a five-inch screen which displayed 52 tiny characters per line. But it also had a very impressive 56 usable kilobytes of RAM and two floppy drives of 90K each. In those days, I spent some time with another student in my college named Peter Sollich. We had read about a new language called Modula-2, which we found very elegant and well-engineered. So the plan was born to write a Modula-2 compiler for 8-bit Z80 computers. There was a small problem in that the only language that came with the Osborne was Microsoft Basic, which was utterly unsuitable for what we had in mind, because it did not even support procedures with parameters—all you had was global variables. Other compilers at the time were too expensive for our means. So we ...