Scala Named ACM SIGPLAN’s 2019 Programming Languages Software Award Winner

Scala has surpassed one million worldwide developers as the enterprise’s most popular language for data-centric applications on cloud-native architectures


SAN FRANCISCO, June 26, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Lightbend today announced that the Association for Computing Machinery’s SIGPLAN special interest group has recognized Scala as its 2019 Programming Languages Software Award Winner. The award recognizes “the development of a software system that has had a significant impact on programming language research, implementations, and tools.” Scala was named the unanimous winner in the 2019 SIGPLAN award process.

Scala has taken over the world of streaming data, where the ability to process event streams in real time has become a fundamental requirement for the most exciting developer opportunities in artificial intelligence, machine learning, internet of things and other data-intensive use cases. Prominent frameworks in stream processing--such as Apache Spark, Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, and Akka Streams--are written in Scala and make use of its powerful language primitives optimized for streaming data workloads. Many of the most admired brands around the globe are transforming their businesses with Scala through streaming data applications that are changing the world.

According SIGPLAN (https://www.sigplan.org/): “Scala is one of the few programming languages from academia that has had a significant impact on the world as well as on programming languages research. It enjoys significant industrial adoption, with early adopters like Twitter and LinkedIn serving as catalysts; it forms the basis of the widely used Apache Spark data analytics platform. Scala's impact on PL research includes the idiom of implicits, which have found their way into other languages; attempts to formalize Scala’s type system have pushed the boundary of type systems research, culminating in the Dependent Object Types (DOT) calculus. In addition, Scala has been a fertile research ground for metaprogramming, macros, staging, and embedded domain-specific languages, including DSLs for machine learning and GPU execution (Delite and OptiML).”

Lightbend and Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) co-own Scala. Lightbend has been the primary driver for all Scala 2.x releases since Lightbend’s founding in 2011. Led by Martin Odersky, the inventor of Scala, EPFL drives language and compiler research through their efforts in Dotty, which will become Scala 3. Scala Center, which is also part of EPFL, focuses on education, documentation, open source community outreach, and tooling.  Lightbend is the primary and lead developer for important projects like sbt and the community build. The open source communities behind Scala and the related projects help drive innovation and improvements via their contributions.

About Lightbend
Lightbend (@Lightbend) is leading the enterprise transformation toward real-time, cloud-native applications. Lightbend Platform provides scalable, high-performance microservices frameworks and streaming engines for building data-centric systems that are optimized to run on cloud-native infrastructure. The most admired brands around the globe are transforming their businesses with Lightbend, engaging billions of users every day through software that is changing the world. For more information, visit www.lightbend.com.

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Lonn Johnston
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