Google Delivers New Java-like Language, Noop

Wait it's by Google? I thought it was just hosted on Google code, as per this thread: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=826945" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=826945</a>

I was at the JVM Language Summit yesterday and went to the session by the developers of Noop. Indeed, it has not been "delivered" - though they have a working "Hello World", the syntax of the language has not yet been finalized, nor have they begun work on a compiler that emits JVM bytecode.<p>The developers work at Google on their internal tools team, focusing particularly on unit testing. Hence, the inspiration for a language that's like Java but with Guice (Google's DI framework) and without the ability to shoot yourself in the foot in the ways that Java makes it particularly easy to.<p>Noop is a 20% time project for the developers. So, there's a tacit endorsement by Google, but it's not as if Google has staffed up a full-time team to deliver a new language that will be used throughout their organization any time soon. The developers don't expect to get much adoption for Noop, and hope that it will mainly influence people's thinking and other tools.

Article fail. It's not "delivered" -- it's a language in the process of being designed.

I am confused.<p>They say, this is made by google, and up to now, the google announcements I saw were very solid projects. Did I miss a lot of google announcements which are not solid projects?<p>On the other hand, the state of this language looks... early? I am not sure. I don't see much code (yes, those 40 lines linked to on this page really show the new and innovative powers of this language), and I do see a lot of 'we propose this and we want that' (+ the usual language buzzwords), which feels much more like a language brainstorm, or maybe the state where the results of the brainstorming are settling down... but nowhere near a solid project...<p>So, sorry to sound very unexcited, but at this point.. who cares about yet another language in a very, very early state?

Can anyone point us to some code examples? I had a hard time finding any.

Alex Eagle from Google presented Noop at the 2009 JVM summit. Slides at <a href="http://wiki.jvmlangsummit.com/Image:Noop_at_JVM_Summit.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://wiki.jvmlangsummit.com/Image:Noop_at_JVM_Summit.pdf</a>

It's written in Scala, 1500 LOC but failed to build either with buildr or with maven. Looks like a premature project.

I don't much care for the Bay Area, but I really wish I could have gone to the JVM Language Summit. Looks like a lot of fun.

A cursory look leads me to conclude that Noop has no primitive types. This results in Int (capital I) typed variables all over. While this follows the naming convention to which I adhere -- CamelCased classes -- there is still some cognitive dissonance. This might be a silly point, but I have not yet had coffee.

What do they mean by a language that supports dependency injection? What would be an example for a language that doesn't support it - stateless languages, I suppose? Because if there is no state, how to remember the dependencies?<p>Edit: Just checked if it is April 1st, but nope, it isn't. They must be serious.

Every time I see a new programming language come out, I can't help but think of the Tower of Babel.

Does the world need another java-like language I wonder, even if its blessed by the google Gods?

It appears to an effort, written in Scala, to be Scala but with Java syntax.

That article is practically unreadable without Adblock.