Why is the Scala Option type not called Maybe, just as in Haskell? [closed]

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Why is the Scala Option type not called Maybe, just as in Haskell?

Maybe makes a lot more "semantic sense" to me, but maybe Option has different behaviour I am not aware of.

Is there any particular reason why Option in Scala was not called Maybe?

Answer 1

Scala is also inspired by Ocaml, which uses Option.

Options are an Ocaml standard type that can be either None (undefined) or Some x where x can be any value. Options are widely used in Ocaml to represent undefined values (a little like NULL in C, but in a type and memory safe way)...

I think the name chosen is a matter of taste.

Answer 2

A better question here would be why Haskell's option type is called Maybe. ML's option type is probably the grandaddy of all option types, and it's called option.

In any case, this is a terminological question, so it's not going to have a principled answer. The people who picked the name in Haskell liked it better, that's it.