Another programming language??? Yes! I had a wise friend who said, in essence, if you could describe a problem in a language dedicated to the problem domain it would be simple to understand and to solve.
I love writing languages and have written my share (Tuil, Browz Script, DbSP, and GSP to name a few). I love learning and using languages. I like many things from each of them. But none have everything I want. (FYI: my current favorites are Ruby, Scala, and Java, each for different reasons.) So I'm writing yet one more language. Will Neo be The One Language to Rule Them All? Probably not. But will this language be way cool and a blast to use? Absolutely!
We're early in the design stage. We are actively looking for willing, talented soles to help us get the language to the initial release stage: 0.1 and beyond.
Neo should be simple to learn, simple to read, and simple to use. This means it should do things in expected ways. It needs to use well known idioms from other languages, but not just programming languages. It should incorporate and support data languages like XML/HTML, JSON, and YAML. It should support the de-facto database language: SQL. It should be simple to define your own language extensions. Which brings us to extensibility.
Many languages claim to be extensible and are to a limited extent. Lisp has lambda. C/C++ has #define macros. Scala has automatic infix notation and type casting. Ruby has method_missing and instance_eval. All of these are used to create DSLs (domain specific languages). The closest I've encountered is Mirah's macros. But they are all too limited.
Neo is designed from the foundation to support and rely on language plug-ins. Plug-ins actually add lexers to the tokenizer, grammar productions to the LR parser, can modify the AST tree after parsing, and add support to the back-end code producers. The core language is all built from Plug-ins.
You are encouraged to extend the language yourself. Does this mean you have to contribute or somehow compile them in to the Neo compiler in order to use them? No. Simply import a class which extends org.neo.Plugin and you will have access to all of the language extensions that plugin implements. On the other hand we actively encourage everyone to send us your awesome language extensions. The best will eventually make their way into the language core. Others will be made available to everyone in the extensions folder.
The best modern languages come with extensive, well written and rigorously tested libraries. There is no way this humble team is going to accomplish something remotely close in our spare time. So we have to leverage what the libraries out there. We also need a state of the art virtual machine, for code reliability, speed and machine and operating system portability.
We have chosen to leverage the Java Platform and the Java Virtual Machine, as many others wisely have before us. Will there be a version for .NET? Probably, as soon as someone volunteers to join the team and port it. Is that someone you?