Definition of Scala

Scala is an abbreviation of the word Scalable Language. This indicates that Scala Programming language has the ability to grow with the growth in the technicalities of your program. The programmers can either go for playing with the language by typing expressions of one lines and going through the results or they may go for using this language for full scale technical programming missions.

The language is used for technical purposes by a wide range of companies, such as LinkedIn, Intel, or Twitter. Scala language consists of a very robust static system provides farfetched support for functional programming. The language is designed in a manner that makes it concise yet function. The pitfalls of Java were used as a basis for the development of a number of design decisions for Scala.

History of Scala

Martin Odersky began the initial designing of Scala in the year 2001 at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). The earlier work was being done on the development of Funnel, which was a programming language that combined ideas from Petri nets and functional programming, and was accompanied with the work done on the development of Scala. Before the development of Scala, Odersky has had an experience of working on Sun’s Java compiler, and Generic Java and javac.

The language was first released internally in the year 2003. This was accompanied by the first public release of Scala in the beginning of 2004. The language was formally released on the platforms of Java, and .NET in the month of June 2004. With some better features, the 2.0 version of the language was released in March 2006. The developments in the language led towards the formal cessation of the .Net support in the year 2012.

Because of the consistent developments made in the language and the extensive focus on the functional programming paradigm, the Scala team was awarded a research grant of €2.3 million from the European Research Council, which extended over a 5-year period, on 17th of January 2011. Odersky and the other related collaborators went on with the formation of Typesafe Inc. on 12th of May 2011.

Typesafe Inc. is an organization that operates under the aim of providing training, commercial support, and other services associated with Scala. Greylock Partners fueled the operations of Typesafe by providing the company with an investment of around $3 million in the year 2011.

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