Martin Odersky wins Swiss ICT Special Award
© 2014 EPFL
Martin Odersky, an EPFL professor best known as the man behind the Scala programming language, is the recipient of the 2014 Swiss ICT Award.
The Swiss ICT jury presented the Special Award to Martin Odersky (School of Computer and Communication Sciences) for developing Scala, a programming language that combines the advantages from the worlds of functional and object-oriented programming.
Scala – on which platforms such as Twitter are based – is regarded by many as a possible successor to Java on the JVM platform. Martin Odersky's language is platform-independent, extendable and scalable, enabling it to develop alongside the requirements and users of the next generation of software.
“We are witnessing a paradigm shift in software development as functional programming comes to the fore,” says the official press release by the Swiss ICT Award. “Scala is a typical pivot language, that supports functional programming, but combines it with classical object-oriented methods.”
Martin Odersky heads the Programming Methods Laboratory at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). He is also the director of Typesafe, a company that is dedicated to developing Scala. According the the jury of the Swiss ITC Award, “he is representative of the innovative force and successful commercialisation of research projects in the industry in the best tradition of Swiss universities.”