Newspeak: A Principled Dynamic Language

Google Tech Talk May 4, 2010 ABSTRACT In this talk, we present the main features of Newspeak, a dynamic programming language focused on software engineering. All names in Newspeak are late bound - including class names. Hence all classes in Newspeak are virtual, every class declaration defines a mixin, and class hierarchy inheritance comes for free. Newspeak has no global namespace and no static state. Top level classes act as module definitions. These have no external dependencies. Each instance of a top level class is a module that runs in its own sandbox in accordance with the object capability security model. Gilad Bracha is the creator of the Newspeak programming language. 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.