Martin Odersky was influenced by these languages according to Wikipedia:
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Java
Haskell
Erlang
Standard ML
Objective Caml
Smalltalk
Scheme
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He was a student of Niklaus Wirth - so there must be some Pascal influence as well. However Pascal is quite simple language (nothing wrong with that) - while the Scala's compiler JAR is massive. Even though Odersky claims Scala is simple language - it is much more sophisticated than Pascal.
However I think Odersky is right to claim that Scala has more orthogonal design compared to Java.
In Scala almost all (all?) special characters can be method names.
5 + 2
5 is the object
+ is the method name
2 is the parameter (another object)
In Java you can't use '+' as a method name (why?) so you have to write:
(new BigDecimal(5)).add(new BigDecimal(2));
(In Java you have to wrap the primitive types in objects. In Scala everything is an object - another reason why the Scala example is so simple. )
So Java is really a Baroque style language.
I think the differences are very clear.
It's easy for me to decide which style "I" like.
I am not bashing Java - I made some good money with the language over the years.
However it is starting to show it's age.
Even Gosling considers the JVM to be his achievement - not the Java language itself that could be replaced easily.
