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Comment by goodthink

6 hours ago

If you love the keyword syntax of Smalltalk, the reflectivity, the incremental compilation, live debugging in the environment, check out https://newspeaklanguage.org for theSmalltalk experience in the web browser.

This is my favorite video by Newspeak's creator Gilad Bracha: https://youtu.be/BDwlEJGP3Mk?si=Z0ud1yRqIjVvT4oO

That talk is fantastic! Just a note for anyone who's interested in Newspeak, it's more of a spiritual successor than a direct descendant of smalltalk (in a good way imo). It has some really slick features like:

* No global import/export namespace (all imports are dependency injected, meaning capability based security is already baked in)

* Nested classes instead of modules

* No variable assignment (everything is a method call)

* Mixins instead of inheritance

* Synchronization and code updates as near primitives

* Support for foreign objects through aliens and proxies, and foreign code can call newspeak objects through expats

* A native serialization to file format

* support for multiple overlapping type systems