Friday, May 8, 2009

Community Choice Award


I nominated Newspeak Programming Language for "Most Likely to Change the Way You Do Everything" Community Choice Award. I don't know how exactly they choose winners, apparently:

The first phase will be to nominate finalists for each of the Categories. Nominations will be accepted at ... between May 6, 2009 at 10:00 a.m. PDT and May 29, 2009 at 4:00 PDT. Among the nominees for each of the Categories, the finalists for the Awards will be chosen. Voting for the final winners will commence at ... on June 22, 2009 at 10:00 a.m. PDT and end on July 20, 2009 at 4:00 pm PDT. ... The odds of winning in any category are dependent upon the total number of eligible nominations received.
Anyway, clicking the orange bot on Newspeak sourceforge page might help the odds - I ask all my readers to contribute a click for a good cause!

Thank you.

UPDATE: Why does Newspeak deserve it? Newspeak is a class-based dynamically-typed object-orientated language that revives the ideals of Smalltalk and Self.  It incorporates many great ideas, but one of the major innovations is its modularity support. 

No other language or framework today provides comprehensive solution for creating modular software. Some languages support hierarchical code organization, there are tools that build components, tools that manage dependencies between components, yet another set of tools and formats deal with module deployment, there are platforms and tools that facilitate versioning and patching, hot and cold updates. Newspeak has it all - the language, development environment, and platform together provide easy and intuitive end-to-end modularity support. 

Newspeak supports both mixin-based inheritance and class nesting - modules are top level classes, while all other classes are nested in them. Dependencies between modules are specified using constructors, the absence of global (static) scope enforces complete isolation of modules and prevents creation of incidental or implicit dependencies. Since all objects communicate via virtual method invocations, there is no hard wired dependency on a particular module implementation. Everything is virtual, including the parent-child relationship between classes, which allows for great flexibility and extensibility. The platform supports construction, serialization and loading of module instances, and therefore effectively supports building and deploying applications without the need for any external tools (even though some of this is still under development). Dynamic platform underneath Newspeak has rich meta-programming support and allows querying module definitions, extending modules and supports hot (incremental) updates. Multiple versions of the same module can coexist without interference. Security is maintained by capability-based model where access to resources is guarded by capability objects (also under development). Modules may access their execution environment (the virtual machine, or platform) and through it interact with external resources. Newspeak is also network-aware, and is designed to support distributed component management using service objects. 

Newspeak is open-source, it was not widely, but successfully, used in an industrial environment, until financial situation deteriorated and corporations turned their back on funding innovation. There are several publications, and more on the way, conference presentations are received with great excitement. Newspeak is modern, it combines "best-of-breed" ideas of computer science and decades of Smalltalk and Java practical experience. It is easy to learn and very pleasant to code in (and not just for Smalltalkers and programming languages afficonados, but also for averagely skilled Java programmers like yours truly). Newspeak philosophy is inspiring. The people who work on it are extremely smart, but also nice and cool guys... Need I say more?

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