Newspeak: Evolving Smalltalk for the Age of the Net

by Gilad Bracha

Newspeak is a new programming language and platform, descended from Smalltalk and Self. Newspeak attempts to preserve what is wonderful about Smalltalk, while addressing its weaknesses with respect to modularity, security and interoperability. Newspeak treats classes as full fledged linguistic entities. It is also a purely message based language, like Self. These two key design decisions lead, almost inevitably, to a language with a powerful component style module system and an object-capability security model. We are using the Newspeak language to build a platform that plays well with its environment both locally on the host machine, and globally over the net.

Bio: Gilad Bracha is the creator of the Newspeak programming language. He is currently Distinguished Engineer at Cadence Design Systems. Previously, he was a Computational Theologist and Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems. He is co-author of the Java Language Specification, and a researcher in the area of object-oriented programming languages. Prior to joining Sun, he worked on Strongtalk, the Animorphic Smalltalk System. He received his B.Sc in Mathematics and Computer Science from Ben Gurion University in Israel and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Utah.