Newspeak (programming language)

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2025-01-05 12:30:03

Newspeak is a programming language and platform in the tradition of Smalltalk and Self being developed by a team led by Gilad Bracha.[ 1] The platform includes an integrated development environment (IDE), a graphical user interface (GUI) library, and standard libraries.[ 2] Starting in 2006, Cadence Design Systems funded its development and employed the main contributors, but ended funding in January 2009.[ 3]

Newspeak is a class-based and message-based language. Classes may be nested, as in BETA. This is one of the key differences between Newspeak and Smalltalk.

Newspeak is distinguished by its unusual approach to modularity.[ 4] The language has no global namespace. Top level classes act as module declarations. Modularity in Newspeak is based exclusively on class nesting.[ 1] Module declarations are first class values (i.e., they may be stored in variables, passed as parameters, returned from methods, etc.) and are stateless.

By design the newspeak lacks undeclared access to a global scope and therefore enforces dependency injection. As consequence it requires all class dependencies (instance variables referred as by "slots") to be explicitly referenced. This makes every class in Newspeak virtual.[ 1] All names of dependencies in Newspeak are late-bound (dynamically bound), and are interpreted as message sends, as in Self.