Martin Odersky is the inventor of the Scala language, a professor at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, and a founder of Lightbend. His work concentrates on the fusion of functional and object-oriented programming. He believes the two paradigms are two sides of the same coin, to be unified as much as possible. To prove this, he has worked on a number of language designs, from Pizza to GJ to Functional Nets. He has also influenced the development of Java as a co-designer of Java generics and as the original author of the javac reference compiler.

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