
Google Delivers New Java-like Language, Noop - kasunh
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Application-Development/Google-Delivers-New-Javalike-Language-Noop-473613/?kc=rss
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waldrews
Wait it's by Google? I thought it was just hosted on Google code, as per this
thread: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=826945>

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Sachmic
It's made by googlers, but I don't think it's officially endorsed by Google.

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plinkplonk
"It's made by googlers"

Yes it is. One of the authors seems to be an "internal software development
coach" (source: [http://www.geekinasuit.com/2009/03/hiatus-should-be-
over.htm...](http://www.geekinasuit.com/2009/03/hiatus-should-be-over.html))
at Google. The other author's blog seems to be down atm
(<http://jakeherringbone.com/>).

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al3x
I was at the JVM Language Summit yesterday and went to the session by the
developers of Noop. Indeed, it has not been "delivered" - though they have a
working "Hello World", the syntax of the language has not yet been finalized,
nor have they begun work on a compiler that emits JVM bytecode.

The developers work at Google on their internal tools team, focusing
particularly on unit testing. Hence, the inspiration for a language that's
like Java but with Guice (Google's DI framework) and without the ability to
shoot yourself in the foot in the ways that Java makes it particularly easy
to.

Noop is a 20% time project for the developers. So, there's a tacit endorsement
by Google, but it's not as if Google has staffed up a full-time team to
deliver a new language that will be used throughout their organization any
time soon. The developers don't expect to get much adoption for Noop, and hope
that it will mainly influence people's thinking and other tools.

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jakeherringbone
Thanks for clarifying, Alex!

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johnm
Article fail. It's not "delivered" -- it's a language in the process of being
designed.

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andreyf
Dear lord, that article fails in too many ways to comprehend. Do yourselves a
favor and jump straight to the goods:

<http://code.google.com/p/noop/>

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tetha
I am confused.

They say, this is made by google, and up to now, the google announcements I
saw were very solid projects. Did I miss a lot of google announcements which
are not solid projects?

On the other hand, the state of this language looks... early? I am not sure. I
don't see much code (yes, those 40 lines linked to on this page really show
the new and innovative powers of this language), and I do see a lot of 'we
propose this and we want that' (+ the usual language buzzwords), which feels
much more like a language brainstorm, or maybe the state where the results of
the brainstorming are settling down... but nowhere near a solid project...

So, sorry to sound very unexcited, but at this point.. who cares about yet
another language in a very, very early state?

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jimfl
"Did I miss a lot of google announcements which are not solid projects?"

You mean like Wave?

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rivo
Can anyone point us to some code examples? I had a hard time finding any.

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gjm11
[http://code.google.com/p/noop/source/browse/#hg/examples/noo...](http://code.google.com/p/noop/source/browse/#hg/examples/noop)

but there's scarcely anything there. Which is all rather weird; I'd have
thought that (1) one of the first things you do when designing a language is
to mock up a load of example code to see how your ideas work together, and (2)
you want to make that available to anyone looking at your language so that
they can get a feel for what it's meant to be like. Oh well.

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DanielStraight
Vaporlang?

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sethg
That's my first impression--I see a bunch of pages on the project wiki with
_proposed_ features for the language, but no documentation along the lines of
"if you actually want to use this language to accomplish something useful,
here's what you do".

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yarapavan
Alex Eagle from Google presented Noop at the 2009 JVM summit. Slides at
<http://wiki.jvmlangsummit.com/Image:Noop_at_JVM_Summit.pdf>

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babo
It's written in Scala, 1500 LOC but failed to build either with buildr or with
maven. Looks like a premature project.

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davidw
I don't much care for the Bay Area, but I really wish I could have gone to the
JVM Language Summit. Looks like a lot of fun.

~~~
raffi
Me too. I'm so busy with my head down in the code that I forget about these
things. I wrote Sleep several years ago and am not as active on it because
it's stable for my needs.

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plinkplonk
" I wrote Sleep several years ago and am not as active on it because it's
stable for my needs."

Too bad you couldn't make the JVM summit. I would have been interested in a
session on the language powering "After the Deadline" than this piece of
almost-vapourware.

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raffi
Thanks, to better inform my judgment, any topics in particular you'd like to
know about? I'm always looking for blog topics and I'll probably approach some
local groups in DC to see if anyone is looking for a speaker.

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plinkplonk
How Sleep made your coding go faster or enabled you to write expressive code
as compared to coding in Java (with code samples drawn from ATD where possible
:) - I like real world code comparisons vs toy examples)

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chasingsparks
A cursory look leads me to conclude that Noop has no primitive types. This
results in Int (capital I) typed variables all over. While this follows the
naming convention to which I adhere -- CamelCased classes -- there is still
some cognitive dissonance. This might be a silly point, but I have not yet had
coffee.

~~~
johnm
Yes, they've said that everything is an object. But, the whole question of
interop with Java is still in flux.

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Tichy
What do they mean by a language that supports dependency injection? What would
be an example for a language that doesn't support it - stateless languages, I
suppose? Because if there is no state, how to remember the dependencies?

Edit: Just checked if it is April 1st, but nope, it isn't. They must be
serious.

~~~
ldh
I'm sure they mean that the language itself supports declaring and injecting
dependencies rather than needing to use an external tool to do it.

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icey
Every time I see a new programming language come out, I can't help but think
of the Tower of Babel.

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jcw
Because we are trying to build a tower from the machine to the abstract?

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Kaizyn
(Probably because there are now nearly too many languages to count.)

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sfphotoarts
Does the world need another java-like language I wonder, even if its blessed
by the google Gods?

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boskone
It appears to an effort, written in Scala, to be Scala but with Java syntax.

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jjs
That article is practically unreadable without Adblock.

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UpFromTheGut
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