The Slate Programming Language

An anonymous reader writes "I know that we have had an influx of new programming languages of late, but I feel that this one merits special attention. Theoretical computer scientists and long-time Squeak and LISP contributors Brian Rice and Lee Salzman have been rapidly developing a language called Slate. It draws on the various strengths of the Self, Smalltalk, and LISP languages. To quote from the website: 'Slate is a prototype-based object-oriented programming language based on Self, CLOS, and Smalltalk. Slate syntax is intended to be as familiar as possible to a Smalltalker, rather than engaging in divergent experiments in that respect.' The beta release is currently being written in Common LISP."

Comments

Re:Ah, great, Smalltalk

[hding]

I suppose the rest of the world can take the five or ten minutes that it takes to understand Smalltalk syntax.

Obligatory.

[hot_Karls_bad_cavern]

If the new language doesn't support your needs, shut up and don't use it.

Use what is best for the situation and don't whine.

Too obscure

[Animats]

By paragraph 2 of the manual, we're here:

• Block closures

  A block closure is an object representing an encapsulable context of execution, containing local variables, input variables, the capability to execute expressions sequentially, and finally returns a value to its point of invocation. The default return value for a block is the last expression's value; an early return can override this.

This is a language for people who like obscure semantics.

Yes, closures are useful. I've used them in LISP. I even used one once in production code in Perl, to do some error handling cleanly. But when the manual starts out with closures, it's clear that somebody is getting too cute.

This is a language for "l33t haxxors", of the old MIT AI Lab persuasion. Check out "instance specific dispatch". Now that's designed to totally confuse maintainers.

Re:Too obscure

[quigonn]

No, it's not obscure. Please have a look at Ruby, where closures are the natural way of doing most things. For example, there is no for-loop, but it is implemented as method for Integer objects (literals are also objects in Ruby):

14.upto(19) do |i|
# do ... end is the closure
end

so, the closure is executed 6 times, the first time with i = 14, the next time with i = 15, the third time with i = 16, up to i = 19.

Just have a closer look at Ruby, and you will see that the whole standard library is built on top of this simple and elegant concept. The book "Programming Ruby" can even be read online and downloaded from www.pragmaticprogrammer.com.

Re:Too obscure

[be-fan]

Closures are everything! All the crap that modern languages do with special-purpose features, like generators, iterators, etc, can be done with closures. Hell, OOP can be done on top of closures.

Re:why slate

[Anonymous Coward]

"i think smalltalk++ would be a better approach than inventing a new language. Look at C++: it's backwards compatable with C, so a C coder is already a C++ coder and can slowly start making use of new C++ features."

Or maybe, just maybe for once we could acknowledge that programmers are smart people and can learn new things. Lets get off trying to bend over backwards and make a broken language better -and- backwards compatible. This is exactly why C++ is the horror that it is today. Write a new clean language and just make sure that it links well with others. Then you can call functions from your old programs written in whatever the hell language you want, nobody knows and the code slowly moves over to a codebase that doesn't rape the programmer (like trying to use exceptions in a C++ program without the exception killing you!).