GoingDeep: Gilad Bracha: Inside Newspeak and Objects as a Service

Lang.NET Symposium 2009 was held on Microsoft's campus (make sure you watch the talks, which are available for your viewing pleasure). We were of course there and conducted several interviews with some of programming language design's brightest thinkers.

Here, language design master Gilad Bracha discusses his Newspeak programming language. What is Newspeak and why was it created? What general problems does it solve that can't be done with already existing languages and tools? What does it facilitate, really? We dig into the fundamental ideas, history and future of Newspeak. Gilad was kind enough to keep the discussion at a level appropriate for a broad technical audience and not just for his fellow scientists.

Newspeak People say: "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."

If you want to understand the thinking behind the thinking of Newspeak, then tune in. Please go ahead and play around with Newspeak, Niners, and provide Gilad and team with feedback.

How far could the notion of Internet-distributed synchronizable objects, or objects as a software service, be taken? 

Enjoy