Martin Odersky is a German computer scientist and professor of programming methods at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. He specializes in code analysis and programming languages. He spearheaded the design of Scala and Generic Java.

In 1989, he received his Ph.D. from ETH Zurich under the supervision of Niklaus Wirth, who is best known as the designer of several programming languages, including Pascal. He did postdoctoral work at IBM and Yale University.

In 1997, he implemented the GJ compiler, and his implementation became the basis of javac, the Java compiler.

In 2002, he and others began working on Scala which had its first public release in 2003.

In 2007, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.

On 12 May 2011, Odersky and collaborators launched Typesafe Inc. (renamed Lightbend Inc., February 2016), a company to provide commercial support, training, and services for Scala.

He teaches three courses on the Coursera online learning platform: Functional Programming Principles in Scala, Functional Program Design in Scala and Programming Reactive Systems.

Roberto Ierusalimschy is a legend:  he is the designer and main implementer of Lua, the de facto standard for scripting languages used in video games such as Roblox, World of Warcraft and many others. More than his (incredible) stories, his (equally incredible) insights, what sets Roberto aside is his light-hearted attitude to sharing his work with the masses, and his unique sense of humor. A wonderful interview of an inspiring personality!

Over his career, Walter Bright has accomplished many wonderful things, his most notable work being the D programming language. In this episode Walter discusses his life's work, including how he embarked upon the creation of the D language and also his work creating the Zortech C++ compiler.