The Newspeak Programming Language
What is Newspeak?
Newspeak is a new programming language in the tradition of Self and Smalltalk. Newspeak is highly dynamic and reflective - but designed to support modularity and security. It supports both object-oriented and functional programming.
Like Self, Newspeak is message-based; all names are dynamically bound. However, like Smalltalk, Newspeak uses classes rather than prototypes. As in Beta, classes may nest. Because class names are late bound, all classes are virtual, every class can act as a mixin, and class hierarchy inheritance falls out automatically. Top level classes are essentially self contained parametric namespaces, and serve to define component style modules, which naturally define sandboxes in an object-capability style. Newspeak was deliberately designed as a principled dynamically typed language. We plan to evolve the language to support pluggable types.
Why Newspeak?
It’s hard to justify a new programming language. Those of us who love programming languages need no justification: if we can make a better language, we obviously should. However, improving the state of the art isn’t enough of a reason for those less passionate about the subject. The costs of learning, tooling and interoperability argue for the status quo. Fortunately, every now and then circumstances change enough to create an opening for new technology.
There are two such changes ongoing at the moment. One is the continuing evolution of the internet. There is growing demand for applications that work well on and off line, combining the ease of maintenance of web applications with the high quality user experience of local clients.
There are those who argue that the answer to these needs is do all computing on the server (in other words, a return to 1970s style time sharing, or early 90s style X-terminals). Instead, we believe in a notion of service oriented computing that allows for off-line operation and leverages the inherent advantages of client devices, while utilizing the strengths of the network. This idea, of objects as software services, has been presented in a whitepaper, slides, video and a blog post ; these don’t mention Newspeak directly, but they do suggest how certain language features could facilitate this notion. We’ve tried to make these features an integral part of Newspeak, which may make it especially relevant in the internet age.
The other big change is multicore processing. It’s not clear how this will play out, but we may finally realize some of the promise of functional programming. And we’re also very likely to see a lot more of actors, and a lot less of the poisonous coupling of concurrent computation with shared state. Newspeak is a natural fit with actor style concurrency, and fully supports higher order functions. Newspeak can support both a traditional imperative style, and a pure functional style. There is one exactly one construct in the entire language that makes it imperative; the rest depends on the libraries you use. So it’s very easy to restrict oneself to coding in a pure functional style in Newspeak.
Status
Newspeak is being developed at Cadence by Gilad Bracha and a very small team. Newspeak will be released as open source software, once it reaches a suitable level of completeness and stability.
At the moment, Newspeak is very much a work in progress. The existing implementation runs on top of Squeak Smalltalk, and shares many of Squeak’s libraries and infrastructure. However, Newspeak has its own GUI libraries and IDE infrastructure under development (see the screenshot below) , and can be implemented independently of Squeak, Smalltalk or any particular VM or IDE.
Who’s to blame for Newspeak:
Gilad Bracha, Peter Ahe and Vassili Bykov, as well as Eliot Miranda (emeritus) with invaluable contributions, both technical and otherwise, by Yaron Kashai.
More about Newspeak
Here are links to whatever information is publicly available about Newspeak:
Gilad Bracha, Peter Ahe, Vassil Bykov, Yaron Kashai and Eliot Miranda. The Newspeak Programming Platform.
A quick overview of the Newspeak platform as of May 2008.
Gilad Bracha. Newspeak Programming Language Draft Specification, Version 0.02.
The current draft language specification. Incomplete, rough and subject to change. Intended for language freaks and implementors; not a user manual or a tutorial.
Vassil Bykov. Hopscotch: Toward User Interface Composition. International Workshop on Advanced Software Development Tools and Techniques (WASDeTT) at ECOOP 2008.
Discusses the design of Hopscotch, the Newspeak GUI application framework, which is the basis for the Newspeak IDE.
Gilad Bracha. Executable Grammars in Newspeak. Electronic Notes on Theoretical Computer Science, Volume 193C, November 2007 pp. 3-18. If you have difficulty accessing the ENTCS version, you can always get the pre-print , which is the same, except for the formatting, which isn’t as nice.
Describes a parser combinator library implemented in Newspeak. The library is unique in how it allows the separate definition and modular composition of grammar and semantic actions. The paper also highlights some features of Newspeak that help it host domain specific languages.
Gilad Bracha. On the Interaction of Method Lookup and Scope with Inheritance and Nesting. 3rd ECOOP Workshop on Dynamic Languages and Applications (2007).
A position paper focused on a narrow but crucial issue: the meaning of names in a dynamic language with nested classes (or objects) and inheritance. Gives some examples of Newspeak.
Video of talk at HPI Potsdam
A long (1:45) session describing the platform as of March 2008
Blog posts:
Object Initialization and Construction Revisited