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?

Brains, bucks and programming languages

The title is supposed to be a paraphrase of "sex, drugs and rock'n'roll" in a geeky context.

This autumn I went to see Paul McCartney in concert - a lifetime dream come true. For most people Paul McCartney is first of all an ex-Beatle. Indeed, during the concert he played many classic Beatles tunes to please the audience. And the audience was very pleased. Then, he cashed in the multi-million-dollar cheque and went back to England to do what he really likes - which at this point seems to be composing experimental electronic music.  To me it looks pretty fair. 

Recently I listenned  to James Gosling's keynote at the JVM Language Summit. I actually enjoyed the presentation very much. One of the things he said, was something like "My dream would be to implement Fortran over JVM ... ah, but I have a day-job".  Now, not that JVM really needs a Fortran IMO. But think about it for a second. How many people in the world can design a programming language? How many of them can design a good programming language? And a popular one? Java is more popular than Beatles. Uhm, well... even if it's not, you get the idea.  Now what can be more important for James Gosling to do during his day job than design a programming language of his choice, I should ask his employer? What? Throwing T-shirts at JavaOne attendants? No, really. Why is it that James Gosling can't do anything he freaking likes for the rest of his life?

I think something in our business is unfair. I am not saying Microsoft model is right, I am very pro open-source and free software and all that. But I'm confused - something about it isn't right. Large IT companies make loads of money, and waste a lot of it on complete crap - I've seen this from inside. So how come Gilad Bracha cannot find funding for Newspeak development? This is totally surreal!

There goes another angry post.

 

DSL - fuel for life

Do you feel that your programming language is too bloated? I do, and I know I am not alone. 

Let's take a look at Java. You may ask - what do you mean, when you say Java? Ah, good question. There is Java, the language, as described in the spec. Java the Standard. Don't you wonder where's the new edition of the book, BTW? Anyway, then there's mini-edition, enterprise edition, real-time Java... there's a huge stack of official/certified technologies (e.g. all the JEE stuff - is JSP or JSF Java? is JPQL?), for which there are often multiple vendors. That's not all, there are all the popular open-source frameworks that don't bother getting Sun's approval, and yet they possess lion-share of the market (e.g. Eclipse, Spring). There's no chance to even keep track of all this, forget mastering. And yet, I don't feel that I have all I need. I have all that, and yet I can't write a descent program the way I'd like to, because I am missing some core features. What? Let's see - how about proper modularity, closures, tuples, local type inference, properties... 

Java made the grade in expanding layer by layer - to the extent where it reminds me the state of the Earth in Wall-E. If you haven't seen the movie, I'll just say that the Earth drowned in human-produced garbage, and the garbage made it inhabitable for anything organic. The garbage in Java makes it impossible for the core, organic features of the language to grow. In the movie, people are leaving, and robots stay back to clean up - now you make the analogy. 

As a Java programmer I really identify with Wall-E. Moving tons of garbage around, day after day, in a desperate attempt to clean up the world - something obviously impossible. And man, I'd love to be that flying-iPod-looking Eve from outer space. She's so strong, so modern, so clean and shiny...  And she has a mission!

If Wall-E is my Java, then my Eve is no doubt Newspeak. 

So what does it mean in a wider sense of programming languages? I think good language should have a small core, as little redundancy as possible. And it should grow from then on. Here's Guy Steel at OOPSLA '98:

I think that the best way of growing is via internal domain specific languages, DSLs, - you don't change the core language, yet you cover more and more domains. Anders Hejlsberg also talked about it at the recent PDC conference - adding features as a DSL; and then, if the DSL is very successful and popular, add syntactic sugar to the core language, as they did with LINQ. I don't think that you need that latter part if your language is well suited for DSLs to begin with. So the language should have a small core and be well suited for DSLs. Java isn't DSL-friendly. Scala is much better, e.g. the Actors library. Haskell, Ruby and of course Smalltalk are really good at it. 

The last part is getting rid of garbage as you grow, and again, Gilad has an idea how to do that. 

I could go on forever and ever about DSLs, showing examples like parser combinators, unit-test and SQL libraries and so on. Martin Fowler is writing a book. So, instead of boring you with repeating what's been said many times, and enumerating lots of references, I will just finish with this cutest quote:

DSLs are for making languages bear-able.

For I am a bear of very little brain and long words confuse me. [Milne 1926]

The premise of this subject is that computers should adapt to the ways of people, and not the other way around.  

Software: Live and Let Die

This week I was lucky to attend Gilad Bracha's guest lecture on Networked Serviced Programming at the Hebrew University. He has been talking about Service Objects for some time now, but nothing compares to hearing it live - Gilad's presentation was witty and fun!

So here is my interpretation and some take-aways.

What's the problem with software? It is too damn complex. Projects crumble under their own weight. It happens to successful projects - our dearly loved Java, for example. Also look at Vista, if you dare. And it's certainly true for the monster-size projects I used to work on. Once upon a time our team took the corporate "quality improvement" policy seriously and decided to investigate what causes bugs in our multi-million lines of code project. We collected all sorts of statistics and ran all possible metrics (which was tricky 'cause some of the tools would choke on such a huge code-base) but long story short our finding was this: the only metric that correlated clearly with defectiveness was LoC. It is hardly news, but a cure to the disease has yet to be found.

There are certainly several things to be done, but what this talk focused on is getting rid of code which shouldn't be there, or in other words - dumping unused code and backwards compatibility. The way we work today - we are bound to not just specs and APIs, but to all the accidental behaviors and bugs in the previous version of our code. It seems that Gilad views code as if it was a live organism. Staying alive means being connected (and network plays a central role in his vision), but we should make way for evolution and some code should die - Gilad calls it "bit rot".

So how do we turn software into a healthy living organism? According to Gilad, there are several things to be done on the technical front first.

• Take advantage of the network: maintain a bi-directional connection with the control center - let programs pull upgrades from the net, but also send back operation statistics. This means that programming platform has to be aware of the network, and aware of the fallacies of distributed computing. This is cloud computing utopia: Internet as a platform, browser as an OS, and Javascript as the low-level programming language into which other languages can compile (in a GWT kind a way).
  
• Modularity: it should be possible to extend and replace individual objects without interference to the whole organism. Gilad has a well developed theory about how modularity should be done in a programming language, based on principles of object-orientation using mix-ins, nested classes and inheritance hierarchies; his new language, Newspeak, is going to implement it.
• Explicit Dependencies between modules - no static, no imports, modules are truely independent and dependency management (wiring) is performed by passing other module instances as parameters to module constructors. This allows to maintain clear boundaries between modules and flexibility in module composition.
  
• Frequent Updates: to allow the "clients" of the object APIs to deal with changes, in addition to maintaining modularity, the changes should be made small and frequent. Call it agility, if you like. That means that we can't afford reboots, and we need to find out when the system is quiescent so that upgrade can be performed, which brings us to the next point...
  
• Reflection and Hot-swapping: objects should allow other objects to find out both static and run-time information about them without breaking the encapsulation. Objects should also allow other objects to modify them "live". Gilad and his team at Cadence are building the support for these features in Newspeak using Mirrors, a concept that originates in Self programming language. It's worth noting that there exist dynamically typed languages that implement hot-swapping today - Erlang being one of them.
  
• Security is important in any distributed system, and even more so if we allow remote objects to mess with the program. So in addition to dynamic typing and pointer safety, Gilad proposes mirrors to be guarded by capability-based security, similar to the one in E programming language.
• Synchronization: many programs need to work with persistent data and it is important to keep the program and the data in-sync. Gilad proposes orthogonal synchronization, based on Smalltalk orthogonal persistence idea, where objects are split into transient and persistent ones by marking object tree roots accordingly. Persistent objects are upgraded whenever the corresponding part of the program is upgraded, and transient objects are lazily recomputed. If the data is ever to outlive the service, it would be exported into some generic format, such as XML.
  
• The most extreme and bold part of this vision is probably No Versions and No Releases - there would be only one version for every program out there. Gilad sees software becoming more of a service than a product, but in order for this to realize we'll have to overcome not just technological, but also psychological and economical barriers - we will have to change the way we develop software and the way we make money of it.
  

Bottom line, all this may sound too futuristic, but "software as a service" and "platform as a service" are making their way in the industry and this wave, if strong and successful enough, may bring the significant change Gilad is predicting.

P.S. As for the rest of us, living in the JVM world, some of the ideas ring a bell. We hope that modularity JSRs and OSGi will improve Java. Those of us who survived Ant and Maven, and felt the weight of a DI framework, will probably appreciate the amount attention Gilad is putting into software composition. It's worth noting the attempts to address hot-swapping on JVM, such as JavaRebel and Jonas Boner's experiments with Scala Actors and Terracotta. Terracotta server also utilizes some ideas which (in my mind at least) look quite similar to the orthogonal synchronization scheme.