For a long time my research has been on how to unify functional and object-oriented programming. This research has led to the Scala language, which combines both technologies while staying completely interoperable with Java. It allows a terseness of style comparable to scripting language but has at the same time a strong and static type system. In this way, it can express common programming patterns in a concise, elegant, and type-safe way. Scala is also a great vehicle for embedding other, domain-specific languages as high-level libraries.

In the talk I will give an introduction to Scala, highlighting its main features and how they lead to an integration of objects and functions. I will then talk about some of our research on embedding parallel domain-specific languages so that they can be executed on massively parallel hardware.