Entries tagged with gilad bracha - Channel 9

Gilad Bracha: Inside Newspeak and Objects as a Service

Charles — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 23:41:00 GMT

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

Anders Hejlsberg and Gilad Bracha: Perspectives on Programming Language Design

Charles — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 17:33:00 GMT

Erik Meijer, Gilad Bracha, Mads Torgersen: Perspectives on Programming Language Design and Evolution

Charles — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 19:52:00 GMT

I attended Lang.NET 2008 and, as expected, learned a great deal from some of the industry's finest language and compiler minds. One of the most interesting talks was Gilad Bracha's session on his new programming language, Newspeak. Newspeak is really compelling from a language design perspective because of its pluggable type system (everything in Newspeak is virtual). His talk was really deep and targeted at his fellow language designers, but it's all starting to make sense to me now (takes a while to sink into my thick skull).

Erik Meijer, our resident programming language guru and a deacon in the Church of the Lamda Calculus (:)), was of course in attendance and presented on the current state of Volta (an excellent managed tier-splitting technology that you should definitely play with).

Mads Torgersen, Danish computer scientist and member of the C# design team, was also in attendance. It's always fun to chat with Mads. He's got a very well balanced and insightful perspective on pragmatic programming language design. We're lucky to have him working with Anders et al on the evolution of C#.

I thought it would be a great idea to get these three characters together in one place to talk about what they know best: programming languages. We have a great discussion on type systems, programming language history, DLR and language futures.

If you are into programming language design, then this is for you. There is no white boarding, but the conversation is deep given the topics covered... It's also a really fun interview with exceptional personalities. We laugh a lot, which is always a good thing. So, step outside of the box, settle into a comfy chair (this is a long one - unedited as usual) and get some new perspectives on programming language design and evolution from some of the top minds in the industry.

Enjoy!

Lo-Res version for the bandwidth challanged.

JAOO 2007: Gilad Bracha - Computational Theology, Functional versus Imperative, Language History and

Charles — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 18:17:00 GMT

I recently got the chance to attend JAOO in Aarhus, Denmark. Besids learning a great amount about various approaches to solving hard problems that we all face as programmers (regardless of the stack we spend most of our time developing on), I got to meet so many interesting people from all walks of programmer life. What a great conference! For one thing, JAOO not about specifc products. It's not about one company's view of the world. It's not about one class of technologies or developer. It's not just about Java and LAMP or .NET and Windows.

I caught up with Gilad Bracha after his session on a new language language he's working on (Newspeak) to discuss a few interesting topics: programming language evolution, static versus dynamic typing, imperative versus functional languages, multi-core and more.

Gilad Bracha is a Distinguished Engineer at Cadence Design Systems. Previously, he was a Computational Theologist and Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems. Computational Theologist?! What on Earth? Tune in and find out ;)

Dr. Bracha 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.

Enjoy!