Scala is a general purpose programming language designed to express common programming patterns in a concise, elegant, and type-safe way. It smoothly integrates features of object-oriented and functional languages, enabling Java and other programmers to be more productive. Code sizes are typically reduced by a factor of two to three when compared to an equivalent Java application.

Many existing companies who depend on Java for business critical applications are turning to Scala to boost their development productivity, applications scalability and overall reliability.

Scala runs on the JVM and .NET, integrating near-seamlessly with libraries on those platforms. GWT integration is also actively developed for Scala (http://scalagwt.github.com/). This signficantly reduces barriers to adoption and has been a key factor in Scala’s success. Worldwide, there are an estimated 100,000 skilled Scala programmers - a number that is continually increasing. We run two very succesful Scala Days conferences in 2010 and 2011 which gathered significant interest within the community - both conferences were quickly sold out before the deadline. We expect an even larger turnout for this year’s conference in London. Scala development is supported by quality development tools: Jenkins for build, issue tracking with Jira, mailing lists (user discussions as well as architecture decisions are made there) and an extensive test-suite. All Scala source code has been recently moved to github (from svn) and since then we are receiving even more contributions from the community.

The Scala team was participating in GSOC in 2010 and 2011 edition and we had many successful projects that were involved in extending the main language compiler, improving IDE support and working on external open-source projects that were written in Scala (like Akka or Lift).

We look for motivated students are who are good in object- and functional-oriented programming (ideally have some familiarity of Scala itself). Apart from the projects proposed on the ideas page we are interested in supervising any projects as long as they are written in Scala.