Why Neptune?

Lately I’ve been writing a lot about the neptune language, the replacement for smalltalk on the OSVM platform. I’ve tried to focus on the technical aspects both because there’s lots to write about but also because when you’re blogging about work, keeping it technical makes it less likely that you’ll accidentally write something, shall we say, career limiting. In this post I’ll take my chances and write about one of the less technical aspects: why we made the switch from smalltalk to a different language, and why we decided not to use an existing language but design our own. It is not about the strategic business decision of changing the language — for that you’ll have to go through the official channels — but my perspective on the switch as one of the people developing the platform.

I’ll start off by explaining a bit about OSVM and why we used smalltalk for the platform in to first place.

Why Smalltalk?

To give some context I’ll start of by describing what OSVM is. The OSVM platform is basically a virtual machine targeted at memory-constrained embedded devices. The platform has been designed with several goals in mind. It should be very simple in order to make the runtime as small as possible, since memory is limited. It should never be necessary to restart the system — if you’re dealing with software for applications security or medical equipment you want the system to be able to run without any interruptions, ever. If an error occurs, and of course they do, it shouldn’t kill the system; rather, it must be possible to diagnose and fix the problem in the field. That’s not always possible but there’s a lot you can do to make it more likely that the system will survive an error. Finally, it must be possible to update the running program in the field, both to fix errors and to install software upgrades. Being able to diagnose a bug in your program is no good if you can’t update the software to fix the problem. This, in short, is what OSVM is all about.

These requirements didn’t pop out of thin air. When you’re used to working with smalltalk this is what you expect from your platform: robustness, flexibility and the ability to interact directly with running programs and to update code on the fly. The smalltalk language and environment were developed together, which means that language was designed with all the issues that are important to us in mind. This is not the case with any language I know outside the smalltalk family, which makes it uniquely suitable for our use.

But using smalltalk is not without problems.

Why not smalltalk?

The languages most used in writing embedded software is C and C++. If a company considers using a platform like OSVM instead they not only have to consider the direct cost of buying the system from Esmertec. They also have to consider the indirect cost in time and money to train their employees to use the system, before they get actually writing software.

C++ is a object-oriented programming language (let’s be generous and call it that) but other than that, C++ and smalltalk are completely different. In order to use smalltalk, a C++ programmer would have to learn everything from scratch: how to declare a variable, how do write an if and while statement, how to write a string or character literal, everything. Since most embedded software is developed in C and C++, that means that there is a considerable indirect cost associated with using smalltalk with OSVM.

The pragmatic programmers recommend that you learn a new language every year. I think learning new languages, both programming and natural, is a great hobby. If I have a deadline, however, “broadening my thinking” by learning a new programming language is not my top priority. Imagine that you were writing a book and had the choice to either write it in English using a primitive ASCII text editor, or in Danish using a state-of-the-art graphical text editor. Assuming that you don’t speak Danish, what would you choose? Or, perhaps more realistically, what would your boss choose for you?

Even though the OSVM system is very much inspired by smalltalk and the smalltalk environment, what is important is not the language itself. The important thing is the properties of the language: robustness, flexibility, serviceability, etc. The goal of the neptune language is to retain all the important aspects of smalltalk but to adapt the less important ones, like the syntax, to make it easier to learn and use by programmers who are used to more mainstream programming languages. That is not to say that syntax is not an important part of smalltalk but it is not essential for its use as a part of OSVM.

I may give the impression that I think smalltalk is the pinnacle of programming language design and any change is a change for the bad. That is not the case: I think there are plenty of ways to improve smalltalk. In changing the language we’ve tried to address many of the quirks and shortcomings of plain smalltalk to get a system that is all-round better to use and not just easier to learn for C or C++ programmers. I won’t go into any details about how I think neptune improves upon smalltalk, though, since that’s a touchy subject that I don’t want to obscure the point I’m trying to make here.

Why Neptune?

Why design a whole new language instead of using an existing one? The whole point is to not force people to learn a new programming language and if we design a new one we can be absolutely certain that no one knows it.

It all comes down the nature of the OSVM platform. The language has to be very simple since the runtime must be minimal. This requirement alone excludes many languages including Java, C# and python. But the real killer is that it must be possible to update the code dynamically. I don’t know of any languages (except smalltalk) where you can give a reasonable meaning to updating the code of a running program in all cases. This is especially bad in languages where the runtime behavior of a program depends on static typing. When designing a language it is very easy to make decisions that make it very hard to update code on the fly. You have to keep this kind of use in mind during the design and smalltalk is really the only language designed like that. Having decided that smalltalk is not the way to go, that means that there are really no existing languages for us to use. Hence neptune.

Designing the language from scratch also means that we’re free to adapt the language to fit our use. The result is a language that, beneath an added layer of syntax, is still very close to smalltalk, and retains many of the properties that makes smalltalk unique. An indication of how close smalltalk and neptune are is that the virtual machine is almost exactly the same as before, the biggest change being that indexing is now 0-based instead of being 1-based. On the surface, however, neptune is much closer to C++ or Java. Basic things like variable declarations, control structures, operators and literals will all be familiar to a C++ or Java programmer. When learning the language this means people will be able to use much of what they already know and will be able to be productive almost immediately, and to move on more quickly to the more advanced concepts such as traits, blocks and optional types.

Some might consider it to be “dumbing” the language down but we’ve also made a conscious effort to make it possible for people to use the language without necessarily being familiar with the full generality of it. When you’re using an ifTrue:ifFalse: expression in smalltalk it might be intellectually gratifying to know that it’s not a “magic” construct, just a method call with two block arguments. But it’s not something you necessarily want people to understand from day one in order to use the language. In neptune, we have a separate if statement but that is still just a shorthand for a call to the if method. You’re free to call that method directly, without the special syntax, to the exact same effect. The full generality of smalltalk, along with some new constructs, is still available to you in neptune but instead of having it forced upon you, you can grow into it gradually. Even though it make the language a bit less clean than smalltalk, I think that is a pretty reasonable tradeoff.

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