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The Newspeak Programming Language

newspeaklanguage.org

45 pointsbrudgers14 comments

I have to say that having a language called Newspeak without a ++ operator feels like a huge missed opportunity. Writing ++good in Newspeak would probably be very satisfying.

[humorless]

Gilad Bracha describes the reference as to the Newspeak dictionary getting smaller with each edition in 1984:

http://www.se-radio.net/2009/07/episode-140-newspeak-and-plu...

The idea of making a language reducible instead of extensible is a rather interesting design motif.

I know what I'll be listening to on my walk! Thanks!

not to mention, ingsockets

One of the interesting features is that modules receive parameters instead of importing names. So dependency injection is 'built-in'.

The author speaks about the design focus of newspeak (modularity, security, reflectivity, interoperability) a bit more here[0]

[0]: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=6898742

Since I've learned LambdaCalc and interpreters I've always been curious why modules were such an oddity, statements in most languages, and even in ML it's still a separate entity (even though research has been made to express it as a single core). Seeing newspeak a while back felt refreshing. I don't know if there are caveat doing things this way though.

Unfortunately, there has already been a newspeak programming language:

http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1983/5980.html

Yeah, from 1983, but still, I'll bet a search for "newspeak programming language" before they chose their name showed Foderaro's version pretty high up.

And yes, there was a real implementation of it, in Franz Lisp (the Lisp from UCB, not the Lisp from Franz, Inc.).

Newspeak's UI paradigm is one of the most interesting things I've seen in years.

The Hopscotch video from 2009 at http://www.newspeaklanguage.org/podcasts-and-talks covers some of it.

Like many other UIs influenced by the Xerox PARC environments.

Might be worth mentioning that the project has been abandoned for a few years (it ran out of funding) and that Gilad now works on Dart at Google.

I suppose for some definition of abandoned: The current download is December 1, 2014.

http://www.newspeaklanguage.org/downloads

As I write this, several parts of the repository have commits less than 24 hours old:

https://bitbucket.org/newspeaklanguage

I think Gilad might need to search something else to do, if he hasn't done so already.

Gilad Bracha & Peter Ahe are also working on Dart btw (https://www.blossom.co/blog/who-is-behind-dart).

Mildly disappointed that this wasn't a 1984-themed joke language.

> "war" == "peace"

true

> 2 + 2

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