SDForum Java Event: Newspeak: A Principled Dynamic Language October 5, 2010

Bio: Gilad Bracha is the creator of the Newspeak programming language. He is currently a VP at SAP Labs in Palo Alto focusing on programming models for the cloud. Previously, he was a Distinguished Engineer at Cadence, and a Computational Theologist and Distinguished Engineer at Sun. 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.

Topic: Newspeak: A Principled Dynamic Language

Newspeak is a dynamic programming language focused on software engineering. Newspeak takes the mantra "program to an interface rather than an implementation" seriously. The language has no global namespace and no static state, and all names are late bound - including class names. All classes in Newspeak are virtual, every class declaration defines a mixin, and class hierarchy inheritance comes for free.

Newspeak is highly modular: dependency injection is unnecessary, the factory pattern is baked in and side-by-side deployment is trivial. Module definitions can be compiled in any order because they have no external dependencies.

The talk will explain how Newspeak achieves this on a very simple semantic foundation, and demonstrate the system in action.

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