

The Newspeak Programming Language - brudgers
http://www.newspeaklanguage.org/home

======
AnkhMorporkian
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.

~~~
brudgers
[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...](http://www.se-radio.net/2009/07/episode-140-newspeak-and-pluggable-
types-with-gilad-bracha/)

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

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

------
PuercoPop
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](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=6898742)

~~~
agumonkey
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.

------
e40
Unfortunately, there has already been a newspeak programming language:

[http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1983/5980.html](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.).

------
cpr
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](http://www.newspeaklanguage.org/podcasts-and-talks) covers some of
it.

~~~
pjmlp
Like many other UIs influenced by the Xerox PARC environments.

------
zak_mc_kracken
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.

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

[http://www.newspeaklanguage.org/downloads](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](https://bitbucket.org/newspeaklanguage)

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

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

> "war" == "peace"

true

> 2 + 2

5

