Last weekend I came across this [1] podcast from se radio. The ideas from newspeak are really interesting and the goal to create a shrinkable language is (modularity) very important.
What classifies Newspeak?
It is a object oriented language, but really more in the sense of smalltalk rather then Java or C++.
I can only speak from my Java experience but the implementation details like encapsulation and so on are really impressive. It seems to me like erlang and newspeak are closely related.
In the interview the term dependency injection is mentioned, which shows that
It is also interesting to mention which roles objects can follow. Things like modules which were added in Scala later as package objects, are just another role of objects with newspeak.
The idea of a plug able type system seems compelling but the further consequences in workflow for example are not obvious to me (yet).
The idea of a plug able type system seems compelling but the further consequences in workflow for example are not obvious to me (yet).
Pattern matching
When reading the paper describing the newspeak pattern matching implementation the comparison with other languages were espacially interesting. Haskell seems to go away from pattern matching and more generalized patterns, while the newspeak implementation specifically was set to enable an even higher level of abstraction with patterns as first class citizen.
Newspeak looks interesting but it would need a much greater user base or stable implementation to get somewhere.
[1] http://www.se-radio.net/2009/07/episode-140-newspeak-and-pluggable-types-with-gilad-bracha/
