It was originally called Scala because the language itself could "scale"; the grammar was so flexible that you could use it to seemingly write new language cons

It was originally called Scala because the language itself could "scale"; the grammar was so flexible that you could use it to seemingly write new language constructs. For example `while` or `repeat` loops are expressible with functions, and it looks natural because dots can be replaced with spaces in many cases. Functions can have many special characters as names, and functions can be called in-fix, and so on. People took these possibilities and ran with them, creating all sorts of wonderfully illegible DSLs. It was widely recognised as a bad idea.