The Weekly Squeak

The video has now been posted of Gilad Bracha‘s talk on Newspeak that we mentioned last month. Newspeak is a new dynamic language being developed at Cadence, and is descended from Smalltalk and Self, with influences from E, Scala and Scheme, exploring ideas around combinatorial parsing, strict message-passing, reflectivity, capability-based security and actor-style concurrency.

Newspeak is being developed on top of Squeak, and the presentation makes a number of direct comparisons with Squeak, especially when discussing UI matters such as the Newspeak widget framework, application framework and Class Browser, and how they’ve improved on Squeak’s access to the operating system with a new FFI framework.

The roadmap for the future development of Newspeak is also laid out, including a discussion of when/whether the code will be published.

(If you’re having trouble viewing the video, see this thread for help).

[Edit – Gilad Bracha has a fascinating blog that records his ongoing development of Newspeak.]