Important Shock

Edit: Fixed some factual inaccuracies about the language itself.

Tim Burks, noted contributor to RubyCocoa and creator of RubyObjC, gave a talk at C4[1] about his experiences with creating a Ruby <-> ObjectiveC bridge, and the problems he overcame in doing so. It was an interesting presentation, and we were all suitably appreciative when he showed his custom visual chip-design software written in Ruby with a Cocoa interface.

And then he dropped a bombshell.

For the past year, Tim’s been working on a new dialect of Lisp - written in Objective-C - called Nu. Here are its features (more precisely, here are the ones that I remember; I was so awestruck that many went over my head):

• Interpreted, running on top of Objective-C.
• Scheme-y syntax. Everything is an s-expression (data is code, code is data). Variable assignment was done without let-clauses (which are a pain in the ass) - all one has to do was (set varname value).
• Variable sigils to indicate variable scope.
• True object-orientation - everything is an object.
• True closures with the do-statement - which, incidentally, is how Ruby should have done it.
• Macros. HOLY CRAP, MACROS! When Tim showed us an example of using define-macro for syntactical abstraction, Wolf Rentzsch and I started spontaneously applauding. His example even contained an example of absolutely beautiful exception handling that should be familiar to anyone with any ObjC or Ruby experience.
• Symbol generation (__) to make macros hygenic and prevent variable name conflicts.
• Nu data objects are Cocoa classes - the strings are NSStrings, the arrays NSArrays, etc.
• Ability to create new Obj-C classes from inside Nu.
• Interfaces with Cocoa libraries - you can access Core Data stores from within Nu in a much easier fashion than pure ObjC, thanks to Tim’s very clever idea of using a $session global to store the NSManagedObjectModel, NSManagedObjectContext, and NSPersistentStoreCoordinator.
• Ruby-style string interpolation with #{}.
• Regular expressions.
• Positively drool-inducing metaprogramming, including a simulation of Ruby’s method_missing functionality.
• A web-based templating system similar to ERb in 80 lines of Nu code - compare that with the 422 lines of code in erb.rb.

Tim showed us a MarsEdit-like blog editor written entirely in Nu, using Core Data as its backend - and then showed us the built-in Nu web server inside that program, complete with beautiful CSS/HTML/Ajax.

As F-Script is to Smalltalk, so Nu is to Lisp. Tim said that he hopes someday to open-source Nu; if he does, he will introduce what is quite possibly the most exciting development in the Lisp-related community in a long time. I don’t think I speak for just myself when I say I cannot wait to get my hands on it.

Last month John Gruber asked the question “Is C the new assembly?”

It’s a tough question - what, exactly, does ‘the new assembly’ mean? The first things that pop into my head when I think of assembly language are these:

1. Fast (or believed to be so)
2. Ugly and difficult
3. Nonportable
4. Foundation for other languages

C has all of these attributes. (And more!) But does it have these attributes in such a way that it can be called ‘the new assembly’? I think so.
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