Yesterday i atteneded a very interesting lecture by Gilad Bracha about Newspeak programming language. Here is a quote from his web site about the language design:
"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."
You can read more here.
Gilad was a co-author of the second and third editions of the Java Language Specification, a major contributor to the second edition of the Java Virtual Machine Specification.
In the lecture he gave yesterday he talked about the major design problems in the Java language and how Newspeak is different. The topics were:
- The problem with Java's global namespace.
- Software modularity (built in the Newspeak language, a paper on this topic here)
- What it means to be a dynamic languge.
- Built in security features.
- High reflectivity of the language.
- Interoperability.
- Threading models (what is wrong with Java's and where the world of languages is going to - Actors model).
I enjoyed the lecture very much, Gilad is a great computer science theoretican in addition to his high practice in real word (When worked at Sun on Java and in Cadence Design Systems on Newspeak). I think that this is where his power is, the conjunction of theory and practice.
You can read more about him and about Newspeak in the folloing links:
jaxenter.com/gilad-bracha-java-is-becoming-cobol-2-0-10456.html
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