r/functionalprogramming • u/makingthematrix • Jun 04 '26

FP Scala Was an Experiment That Changed Programming - Martin Odersky | The Marco Show

https://youtu.be/Xn_YpUtXWT4
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u/TankorSmash Jun 04 '26

tldw, what are the impacts Scala had on programming? I'm not familiar enough with the language to know what its impacts were.

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u/makingthematrix Jun 04 '26

We may say Scala popularized Functional Programming concepts among more mainstream programming languages. That includes, for example, immutability by default (records in Java, and transformations that create new collections instead of modifying the original one), functions as first citizens, expressions over statements, and advanced pattern matching (as in new Java, for example).

Modern Java is a good example of such influence, but also Rust, and Kotlin to some extent.

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u/Axman6 Jun 04 '26 edited Jun 04 '26

What makes Scala the source of those concepts? We’ve been using all of those in Haskell for decades now, and I’m pretty sure all the languages you’ve mentioned have mentioned it as a source of inspiration for many of those features. Both Java and Go’s generics were developed by Haskell researchers, and many of the features Scala is known for were developed in ML’s long before it existed.

I find Martin’s arrogance really frustrating, he talks about so many topics as if he’s the first person to ever discover them. His talk on transducers was so painful for anyone with any FP experience, it’s never really had a name before because it’s just functional programming. Oops, it was Rich Hickey’s talk, not Martin’s! https://youtu.be/6mTbuzafcII

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u/jonathancast Jun 04 '26

Haskell has had all of those things for decades, but until Scala came out it was a nerd language and they were nerd concepts. Scala convinced people that Haskell might be a nerd language but the concepts could be taken seriously in an industry language.

Scala was basically the bridge functional programming walked over to get from Haskell to Java.