Frequently Asked Questions - General

This is a list of frequently asked questions about Scala, maintained by the core team developing Scala. All questions are ones frequently asked in public forums. Roughly, more frequent questions should appear earlier in the list.

The FAQ on the wiki is maintained by volunteers in the community. It tends to get updated more frequently, but its answers come from a less reliable source.

Scala is a programming language. It is both object-oriented (think inheritance, methods, ...) and functional (think closures). It blends a number of modern language features, while maintaining close compatibility with Java.

The LAMP group at EPFL, led by Prof. Martin Odersky.

Either submit it as a "bug", or post it to the mailing list for discussion.

We use Jira for tracking scala-related issues.

In general, yes. At this point, the specification is completely implemented, there is a fully passing test suite of hundreds of tests, and the compiler is self-hosting. That said, if you find a bug, do let us know and we will try to fix it.

Scala is distributed under a BSD-style license. You have very wide freedom to distribute Scala programs, Scala itself, and modified versions of Scala.

The name comes from two sources. First, "scala" is the Italian word for stairway, which is appropriate since Scala helps you ascend to a better programming language. The Scala logo is an abstraction of a stairway. Also, Scala stands for scalable language, because Scala's concepts scale well to large programs.

The rationale is available is the Introduction to Scala.

The images are as follows:

• "Introduction": This very professional image is called "Gaia Shine", and was created by Flávio Takemoto.
• "Learn Scala": The image is called "Book...", and the author is Zsuzsanna Kilián.
• "In the Enterprise: This fantastic image is "Golden Egg", authored by Mateusz Stachowski.
• "Research": The painting is "Come Unto These Yellow Sands", painted by Richard Dadd in 1842.
• "Community": it is a picture of Prague, part of the free Drupal theme called "Marinelli"
• "The Compiler": the picture is "Roger", and is also part of the free Drupal theme called "Marinelli"

The name "Scala" means staircase in Italian. In one of the buildings of EPFL, where the Scala language was developed, there is a modern staircase with a rather interesting shape, which was the inspiration for our logo. You can see it depicted below in a picture taken by Miles Sabin (available under a Creative Commons license).