Opening Talk: Martin Odersky
Director of the Programming Methods Laboratory – LAMP
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Scala: Where we are, where we go to.

The Scala community has seen steadily accelerated growth over the last two years. Last year alone has seen an eight-fold increase in the number of downloads of the Scala compiler and libraries from our servers. In my talk I give an overview of recent developments and highlight ongoing projects in the Scala community and at EPFL. I then outline some of the challenges that the field of programming will likely be facing in the future, and present our plans on how to address them.

Martin Odersky is a professor at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland. He is best known as the creator and principal designer of the Scala programming language. Prior to that, he made several contributions to the development of Java. He created the Pizza and GJ languages, designed the original version of generics for Java, and wrote the javac reference compiler. He is interested in programing languages and methods, in particular how object-oriented and functional programming can be made to work seamlessly together. Martin Odersky received his doctorate from ETH Zürich, in 1989. He held researcher positions at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center and Yale university and faculty positions at the University of Karlsruhe from 1993 and at the University of South Australia from 1997. In 1999 he joined EPFL as full professor. He is on the editorial board of the Journal of Functional Programming and member of IFIP WG 2.8. He was conference chair for ICFP 2000, and program chair for ECOOP 2004 and ETAPS/CC 2007. He is a fellow of the ACM.