JavaZone 2008 - Agenda -

Newspeak 101 for Java Programmers

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Intermediate
Emerging Technologies

Room: Lab 5
Timeslot: 17.09.08 14:15
Speaker: Gilad Bracha

Newspeak is a new programming language being developed at Cadence. Newspeak is directly descended from Smalltalk, with heavy influences from Self and Beta. Newspeak is a principled dynamic language, and incorporates lessons drawn from a decade of experience maintaining the Java language and VM specifications.

Newspeak takes the principle of programming to an interface to its logical conclusion: every operation in Newspeak is effectively a virtual method invocation. This includes references to fields, classes and superclasses. Classes my nest arbitrarily, as in Beta. Since all names are late bound, all classes are virtual; in particular, superclasses are virtual, so all classes act as mixins.

There is no static state in Newspeak. Instead, top level classes act as module definitions, which are independent, immutable, self-contained parametric namespaces. They can be instantiated into modules which may be stateful and mutually recursive.

Naturally, like its predecessors, Newspeak is reflective: a mirror library allows structured access to the program meta-level, including the ability to modify the code while it executes. Synergy between a small number of key design decisions makes for a language that is small, expressive, modular, and lays a foundation for security as well.

Gilad Bracha

Gilad Bracha is the creator of the Newspeak programming language. He is currently Distinguished Engineer at Cadence Design Systems. Previously, he was a Computational Theologist and Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems. He is co-author of the Java Language Specification, and a researcher in the area of object-oriented programming languages. Prior to joining Sun, he worked on Strongtalk, the Animorphic Smalltalk System. He received his B.Sc in Mathematics and Computer Science from Ben Gurion University in Israel and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Utah.