It was designed by Gilad Bracha, Martin Odersky, David Stoutamire, and Philip Wadler to offer developers a smoother transition and better Java compatibility than the Pizza programming language, previously created by Odersky and Wadler.
Gilad Bracha is the creator of the Newspeak programming language, a software engineer at Google and a member of the Dart (programming language) team in Aarhus.
James Gosling, Bill Joy, Guy L. Steele Jr., Gilad Bracha, The Java Language Specification, Third Edition, Addison-Wesley Professional, 2005, ISBN 0-321-24678-0