History and purposes of Scala

Scala is a general-purpose programming language that comes with support of functional programming and a strong static type system. The source code of Scala is intended to be compiled into Java bytecode, so that the resulting executable code can be run on Java virtual machine (JVM).

Martin Odersky started the design of Scala back in 2001 at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). It was an extension of his work on Funnel, which is a programming language that uses functional programming and Petri nets. The first public release appears in 2004 but with only on the Java platform support. Later on, it was followed by .NET framework in June 2004.

Scala has become very popular and experienced wide adoptions because it not only supports the object-oriented programming paradigm, but it also embraces the functional programming concepts. In addition, although Scala's symbolic operators are hardly easy to read, compared to Java, most of the Scala codes are comparatively concise and easy to read -e.g. Java is too verbose.

Like any other programming languages, Scala was prosed and developed for specific purposes. Now, the question is, why was Scala created and what problems does it solve? To answer these questions, Odersky said in his blog:

"The work on Scala stems from a research effort to develop better language support for component software. There are two hypotheses that we would like to validate with the Scala experiment. First, we postulate that a programming language for component software needs to be scalable in the sense that the same concepts can describe small as well as large parts. Therefore, we concentrate on mechanisms for abstraction, composition, and decomposition, rather than adding a large set of primitives, which might be useful for components at some level of scale but not at other levels. Second, we postulate that scalable support for components can be provided by a programming language which unifies and generalizes object-oriented and functional programming. For statically typed languages, of which Scala is an instance, these two paradigms were up to now largely separate."

Nevertheless, pattern matching and higher order functions, and so on, are also provided in Scala, not to fill the gap between FP and OOP, but because they are typical features of functional programming. For this, it has some incredibly powerful pattern-matching features, which are an actor-based concurrency framework. Moreover, it has the support of the first- and higher-order functions. In summary, the name "Scala" is a portmanteau of scalable language, signifying that it is designed to grow with the demands of its users.

Table of Contents for History and purposes of Scala

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Table of Contents for
History and purposes of Scala