Martin Odersky (born 5 September 1958) is a German computer scientist and professor of programming methods at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. He specializes in code analysis and programming languages. He spearheaded the design of Scala and Generic Java (and Pizza before).
In 1989, he received his Ph.D. from ETH Zurich under the supervision of Niklaus Wirth, who is best known as the designer of several programming languages, including Pascal. He did postdoctoral work at IBM and Yale University.
In 1997, he implemented the GJ compiler, and his implementation became the basis of javac, the Java compiler.
In 2001, he and others began working on Scala which had its first public release in 2004.
In 2007, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.
On 12 May 2011, Odersky and collaborators launched Typesafe Inc. (renamed Lightbend Inc., ), a company to provide commercial support, training, and services for Scala.
He teaches three courses on the Coursera online learning platform: Functional Programming Principles in Scala, Functional Program Design in Scala and Programming Reactive Systems.
He received the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award in 2025.
See also Timeline of programming languages Scala programming language
References
External links
Biographical notice , EPFL website
Interview with Martin Odersky about Scala Dr. Dobb's, 2011 Martin Odersky on the Future of Scala, Interview by Sadek Drobi on Jan 10, 2012 Martin Odersky on the release of Scala 3.0.0