Newspeak (programming language)

Newspeak is a programming language and platform in the tradition of Smalltalk and Self being developed by a team led by Gilad Bracha. The platform includes an IDE, a GUI library, and standard libraries. Starting in 2006, Cadence Design Systems funded its development and employed the main contributors, but ceased funding in January 2009.

Newspeak is a class based language. Classes may be nested, as in BETA. This is one of the key differences between Newspeak and Smalltalk. All names in Newspeak are late-bound, and are interpreted as message sends, as in Self.

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

The name "Newspeak" is inspired by George Orwell's newspeak appearing in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The heading on the programming language's website says "It's doubleplusgood". The motivation for the name is that Orwell's Newspeak language grew smaller with every revision; Bracha views this as a desirable goal for a programming language.

The language icon is supposed to be Big Brother's eye, as seen in page 3 of the documentation.

It should not be confused with the safety critical programming language of the same name designed by Ian Currie of RSRE in 1984 for use with the VIPER microprocessor.

Here is the classic Hello world program :