The Water Language

By Martin Heller

January 6, 2003

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When it comes to programming languages, it seems there's something new popping up every month. For instance, to start with, there's Erlang, a concurrency-oriented programming language and environment I heard about at the Lightweight Language Workshop (LL2), which I discussed briefly last month. There's also Haskell, a functional language which kept coming up during discussions of other things at LL2.

Then there's K, an interesting little language I found out about accidentally while looking into other things. There's D, which is Walter Bright's proposed successor to C and C++, about which I've been meaning to write for well over a year. D is still in an alpha state, which has been staying my hand. Walter was one of the brains behind what I consider to be technically some of the best C and C++ compiler implementations ever, and I take what he does seriously. For more details on D, see "The D Language," by Walter Bright, Dr. Dobb's Journal, February 2002.

There are several more little languages that I heard about at LL2: Lazlo, Jscheme, and Needle, for instance. I also found out some interesting things about Python's implementation of persistent objects (for the Zope database), and Python's problems with asynchronous exceptions.

Two new commercial Java tools recently caught my attention too: M7, and JBuilder 8. M7 is an application assembly platform for J2EE, which claims to cut J2EE development time in half. Mansour Safai, formerly in charge of Visual Café at Symantec, and Zack Urlocker, formerly of Borland, gave me a convincing demonstration of M7's power, but I haven't had the time to knuckle down and really use it myself.

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