Martin Odersky is the creator of the Scala programming language and a full professor at EPFL in Lausanne, where his official faculty page lists him in the Laboratory of Programming Methods (LAMP). The same page records that he received the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award in 2025, a recognition of long-term influence on the field.
Before Scala, Odersky did foundational work on the Java type system. The “Scala’s Prehistory” account on the official Scala site describes how, working with Philip Wadler in the mid-1990s, he created Pizza, a functional language compiling to Java bytecodes, and that this work “led eventually to GJ, the new javac compiler, and Java generics.” In other words, the standard Java compiler that millions of developers use, and the generics feature added to Java, trace back in part to Odersky’s research.
That same source traces his path to Scala. After GJ he built an experimental minimalist language called Funnel at EPFL, but found that “minimalism is great for language designers but not for users.” The lesson pushed him toward a more pragmatic design that interoperated cleanly with Java, which became Scala, designed starting in 2001 with a first public release in 2003.
Through Scala, Odersky brought functional programming techniques into the mainstream JVM world and influenced the design of later languages. He is the anchor figure of the Scala story in the Code Library: a researcher whose academic work on type systems reshaped both the Java that already existed and the new language he built alongside it.