&gt; It&#x27;s pretty well known that Scala was heavily influenced by Haskell.<p>Except that Martin Odersky himself has explicitly said that the primary influences were SML&#x2F;OCaml and Java.<p>&gt; In particular, do notation (for comprehensions),<p>I&#x27;ll give you that one<p>&gt; pattern matching<p>Which pre-date Haskell by nearly 2 decades in ML<p>&gt; lots of standard lib classes (ex Maybe (Option)),<p>Also pre-date Haskell by nearly 2 decades, in addition to be named exactly the same as ML.<p>&gt; many of the methods in the collections library (map, fold, take, etc)<p>Which pre-date Haskell by almost 4 decades with origins in LISP.<p>&gt; Just poking fun at the seemingly common &quot;I want to use Haskell but I&#x27;m forced to deploy on the JVM&quot; use case for Scala.<p>Which is where the Scalaz folks come in. They want to piggy back off of something successful, as opposed to Frege, which is closer to what they actually want (avoiding success at all costs?). Who knows, maybe they actually like the strict-evaluation by default of Scala&#x2F;ML, which is quite pragmatic, but definitely more in line with ML than Haskell.