Gilad Bracha: Inside Newspeak and Objects as a Service

Posted By: Charles | Apr 30th @ 4:41 PM | 39,438 Views | 13 Comments
Lang.NET Symposium 2009 was held on Microsoft's campus (make sure you watch the talks, which are available for your viewing pleasure). We were of course there and conducted several interviews with some of programming language design's brightest thinkers.

Here, language design master Gilad Bracha discusses his Newspeak programming language. What is Newspeak and why was it created? What general problems does it solve that can't be done with already existing languages and tools? What does it facilitate, really? We dig into the fundamental ideas, history and future of Newspeak. Gilad was kind enough to keep the discussion at a level appropriate for a broad technical audience and not just for his fellow scientists.

Newspeak People say: "Like Self, Newspeak is message-based; all names are dynamically bound. However, like Smalltalk, Newspeak uses classes rather than prototypes. As in Beta, classes may nest. Because class names are late bound, all classes are virtual, every class can act as a mixin, and class hierarchy inheritance falls out automatically. Top level classes are essentially self contained parametric namespaces, and serve to define component style modules, which naturally define sandboxes in an object-capability style. Newspeak was deliberately designed as a principled dynamically typed language. We plan to evolve the language to support pluggable types."

If you want to understand the thinking behind the thinking of Newspeak, then tune in. Please go ahead and play around with Newspeak, Niners, and provide Gilad and team with feedback.

How far could the notion of Internet-distributed synchronizable objects, or objects as a software service, be taken? 

Enjoy
Rating:
5
0
#Apr 30th @ 6:52 PM
exoteric
exoteric
人
A superb presentation of the benefits of Newspeak!
- capability based security
- very generic module system
- almost functional
- network object synchronization
- etc
#Apr 30th @ 7:00 PM
Charles
Charles
Welcome Change
Now play with it, man!
C
#Apr 30th @ 10:57 PM
staceyw
staceyw
Before C# there was darkness...
I was thinking about something like this today based on other Lang.Net talks.  Lets take a popular need like Quickbooks or MS Accounting.  Typically, the "store" runs on a pc/server at the office.  So to get remote to it to check a customer balance (for example) is kinda a lot of work and involves:
1) fire up a browser.
2) start gotomypc, or logmein or live mesh and get a remote desktop session.
3) Login to remote windows.
4) wait for desktop to paint remotely.
5) start quickbooks or msAccounting
6) login.
7) find customer and drill in, etc.

Not climbing a mountain, but a lot of work.  Now do it 10 times a day.

Now say a remotable object represents behavior (UI) and data (a customers statement history) and security.  You can drag that onto your desktop from the service and have it sync automatically.  So at all times I can have that customer or many customers on my desktop that shows there balance (maybe I could even drag other View objects onto this object for skinning UI).  The comm part works via Azure to surface the Object and Azure backend talks to QB service via .Net Services.  You could have a another Object/Behavior that is a collection container to host a collection of Customers so you can orginize and summarize many customers in a list.  So now you have a virtual desktop app that is composable and how you want to see and organize your data on your desktop - like a custom Dashboard.  But it is just soft links (i.e. shortcuts) to URIs in the cloud.  You can even email your customer their own account link so they can have it to review and print stuff they way they like.  Colaboration/interaction becomes the next plus.  Maybe now send all your customer links to a 3rd party to handle AR (invoices, statements) and collections, address changes, etc.  Same ideas with vendors and checking accounts.  See account balances in "gadget" objects, post a check or visa charge to have it recorded back to mother, etc

Trying to get my head around how this compares/contrasts to using things like LiveMesh sync and ClickOnce today - because you could do much of this today without remotable objects using more brute force methods.   Interesting space.
#May 1st @ 4:07 AM
rhm
rhm
Haven't had time to watch the video yet, but I have to ask: Is Newspeak a reference to George Orwell's 1984, or is it just a co-incidence? Smiley
#May 1st @ 7:44 AM
vesuvius
vesuvius
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
It is Nineteen-Eighty-Four Big Smile

I must confess thinking the same though.
#May 1st @ 9:12 AM
JasonOlson
JasonOlson
I don't know the official answer, but my guess is that yes, it is most definitely a reference to 1984. In his Lang.net talk, he introduced himself as being from the Ministry of Truth Smiley.
#May 1st @ 9:17 AM
Charles
Charles
Welcome Change
Indeed. Gilad explains the reasoning behind the name in the documentation for the language. Orwell's Newspeak has a vocabulary that grows smaller over time. This is a characteristic that programming language vocabularies do not have; they typically increase in size over time as they evolve to enable more expressiveness to compose solutions to new problems (and for comaptibility reasons removal of language features is almost always a bad idea...). And, by now, you should get Gilad's sense of humor Smiley

C
#May 1st @ 9:24 AM
JasonOlson
JasonOlson
Pure and utter WIN is that name. You just have to love Gilad Smiley.
#May 1st @ 9:31 AM
Charles
Charles
Welcome Change

Very thoughtful, staceyw. In fact, I think a Newspeak object service on Azure would be a fun project and would provide for really compelling applications that evolve, at the object level, without the need for explicit recompilation by the author. Further, imagine the model where the objects you use can come from some distributed service in the cloud and the pain of versioning is completely removed from your plate, by design. You could imagine an ecosystem of developers who write and maintain object services that you consume at design time once, then the runtime system takes care of the synchronization with the cloud, object versioning, etc - you don't need to compile to incorporate updates, etc.

I posed this idea to Gilad after the interview and he smiled approvingly. So, this is not insane. Smiley As mentioned in the interview this aspect of Newspeak is not fully baked and is on Gilad's plate of futures.

C

Microsoft Communities