Computerworld is undertaking a series of investigations into the world of programming languages. We’ve already looked at some other functional languages such as Haskell, Erlang, and Clojure.

In this interview, Martin Odersky talks about Scala; one of the newer languages which runs on the Java Virtual Machine, which has become increasingly popular.

“It means scalable language in the sense that you can start very small but take it a long way. For newcomers, it looks a bit like a scripting language. For the last two years we have actually been invited to compete in the JavaOne ScriptBowl, a Java scripting language competition. But Scala is not really a scripting language — that’s not it’s main characteristic. In fact, it can express everything that Java can and I believe there are a lot of things it can offer for large systems that go beyond the capabilities of Java. One of the design criteria was that we wanted to create a language that can be useful for everything from very small programs right up to huge systems and without the need to change structure along the way. ”

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