New to newspeak. Had some questions.

[joseph turco]

Hello all,

So i was looking at a programming language to use for fun, and i came by smalltalk, but then i found newspeak. i must say i do enjoy the fact that it runs in a web browser and not a VM, meaning it runs much faster on my raspberry pi than traditional smalltalk. I did have some questions, is there anywhere to learn how to use this language? Im not an experienced programmer so i don't really know the in's and out's of other programming languages. Is this not a language/platform suitable for me? sorry if im bothering anyone, and excuse my ignorance.

[Gilad Bracha]

Hi Joseph,

Welcome!

On Tue, Aug 10, 2021 at 10:56 AM joseph turco <italian...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello all,

So i was looking at a programming language to use for fun, and i came by smalltalk, but then i found newspeak. i must say i do enjoy the fact that it runs in a web browser and not a VM, meaning it runs much faster on my raspberry pi than traditional smalltalk. I did have some questions, is there anywhere to learn how to use this language?

You could start with:

https://newspeaklanguage.org/samples/Literate/Literate.html

Then watch the talk at:

https://www.tele-task.de/lecture/video/3058/

which is a pretty good overview of the language and its ideas. That might also give you a sense if it's right for you.

It also covers a lot of IDE stuff, which is somewhat out of date, because it deals with the old Smalltalk based system, but it will give you a sense.

I think all this will help you decide if this is for you or not.

Newspeak has an emphasis on software engineering and security concerns that come up for more advanced users and usages.

If you're still interested, you could try the tutorial at 

https://newspeaklanguage.org/ns101/ns101.html

even though it is out of date (it also refers to the older Smalltalk-based environment, which you could still run).

Milan Zimmerman (on this list), has created some documents as well. They are constantly evolving and probably not perfectly accurate, but they may be helpful all the same. See

https://mzimmerm.github.io/2021/05/newspeak-a-few-notes

There are a number of other talks and papers on the web site. There are a couple of videos showing the web system in action, such as:

https://youtu.be/VUfZ1sL4aps

 

Im not an experienced programmer so i don't really know the in's and out's of other programming languages. Is this not a language/platform suitable for me? sorry if im bothering anyone, and excuse my ignorance.

Not at all. Now whether Newspeak is for you or not is a very good point. If you are new to programming, Smalltalk may well be a better choice right now. So perhaps you'll want to play with Smalltalk and come back to Newspeak when you're comfortable with Smalltalk.

There is a choice of Smalltalk systems, and they are much more mature than the web based Newspeak system.

My favorite would be Glamorous Toolkit.

There are even Smalltalks that run in the browser, though their maturity is also in doubt. You could look at SqueakJS or Amber Smalltalk.  As for performance - the web based version of Newspeak is not very performant at the moment, so that is certainly not a consideration in our favor.

Now if you decide to stick with Newspeak, we'll be glad to answer questions - many have been discussed on this list.

I've been asked to prepare a course on Newspeak, and in the process I really should create a proper tutorial, and maybe even a book, but this will take quite a while.

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Cheers, Gilad

[Milan Zimmermann]

Hi Joseph,

Gilad's comments provide links and suggestions to your questions, and also a path through Smalltalk. For what it is worth, let me summarize my personal reasons for playing with Newspeak. From your message, I realize your motivation is different, but I thought sharing this could provide another perspective.

So first of all, I feel a Smalltalk type language is an excellent choice for it's consistent, readable and writable syntax  (even if it had no other pluses) .

Being a practicing software person, not a theoretical CS person, over the years I have tortured my head over questions, and sometimes was bitten by (not alone in either :) ) related problems that crop up all over again in our industry. To select just a few of many such questions (simplified wording though):

- Why is (mutable) global state bad?

- Concurrent computation: Are resource-sharing approaches such as threads problematic?

- Reflection and security tradeoffs?

- Can a language that is late bound also have some level of typing mechanism?

- Multiple inheritance issues and are there solutions?

- Are OO and functional languages compatible?

(etc etc .. Many of these problems are actually related on some level, which makes thinking about them harder. They all have program security, writability, and maintainability consequenses). 

The reason that drew me to Newspeak many years ago (although only now I am starting to give it more time) is that Gilad et. al. address, directly or indirectly, many of these problems and questions in Newspeak.  Newspeak applies solutions that are based on modern research ("modern" may be 40+ years old, but other platforms ignore even that old research), to a wide range of these problems, which makes it interesting and unique (from my personal non theoretical CS understanding) - "principled" as they say.

Well, anyway. Sorry to make this so long, and probably not too relevant :) 

Good luck with your quest and experiments.

Milan

[joseph turco]

Thank you both for your responses.

The reason I avoided smalltalk is because of VM performance on arm systems. I have tons of lag when i use any of the smalltalk VMs on my computer which is a raspberry pi 400. When i use newspeak, I have no problems at all, since it is web based. I did not know about Amber smalltalk. That is interesting. Another issue with smalltalk is that there are also no guides for newcomers that don't understand the nuances of other languages, yet Alan Kay made smalltalk-80 for children to use. I find that odd. I guess i will have to find something else that can teach me some basic stuff, and then i can come onto newspeak. I do wish i was more apt on the subject.

regards,

Joseph Turco

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[Gilad Bracha]

Hi Joseph,

Don't hesitate to ask questions, either on this forum, or by e-mailing me to gi...@bracha.org. Best of luck!

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Cheers, Gilad

[Milan Zimmermann]

Joseph,

For curiosity, when you use Newspeak in the browser, do you run the browser on the raspberry? 

If it is fast, it is a good sign, although I am a bit surprised as all of Newspeak runs in the browser. 

Just wanted to check the context you are in

Milan

[joseph turco]

yes i am running it on my raspberry pi 400 with 64 bit raspbian (huge performance upgrade vs 32bit ARM) and using mozilla firefox. i have no latency and things work great.

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[Gilad Bracha]

On Fri, Aug 27, 2021 at 7:11 AM joseph turco <italian...@gmail.com> wrote:

yes i am running it on my raspberry pi 400 with 64 bit raspbian (huge performance upgrade vs 32bit ARM) and using mozilla firefox. i have no latency and things work great.

I think that's awesome. 

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Cheers, Gilad

[joseph turco]

I actually use the pi 400 as my main computer. Its really neat everything is packed inside this keyboard, and the performance of the system.

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[Milan Zimmermann]

Cool, thanks for the update!

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