We recently submitted a paper on Grace to the Onward! conference at SPLASH 2012. You can read a draft: please do send comments or attach them below. To whet your appetite, here is the abstract:
Grace: the absence of (inessential) difficulty
by Andrew Black, Kim B. Bruce, Michael Homer, and James Noble
We are engaged in the design of a small, simple programming language for teaching novices object-oriented programming. This turns out to be far from a small, simple task. We focus on three of the problems that we encountered, and how we believe we have solved them. The problems are (1) gracefully combining object initialization, inheritance, and immutable objects, (2) reconciling apparently irreconcilable views on type-checking, and (3) providing a family of languages, each suitable for students at different levels of mastery, while ensuring conceptual integrity of their designs. In each case our solutions are based on existing research; our contribution is, by design, consolidation rather than innovation.
Have you heard of the J programming language? It is based on APL and closely related to K. As a novice, I find this very easy to work with. Here is a link to their chapter on learning Object Oriented Programming: http://www.jsoftware.com/help/learning/25.htm
It is definitely different than C++ and Java, which I plan on learning as well to better participate in the lingua franca most programmers have developed. Yet, in many ways, I feel that C++ and Java have become some big that it is difficult for a novice like me to dig in. Plus, I feel they have strayed far from machine code so much that they become bulky and take more processing to implement.
If you look into solving problems on http://www.projecteuler.net, J takes much less written code to solve these than does C++.
Hi Sarah – yes we’ve heard of J, but as you say, its a long way from C++ and Java — and there’s rather more C++ and Java in the world than J.