Wouter van Oortmerssen is a living legend in the Amiga community. Mostly known about his ability to design and code a whole bunch of programming languages throughout the years, interpreted or compiled (counted 38 so far). Today we host a mini-interview with Wouter regarding the SHEEP programming language. SHEEP is a new scripting/querying/ipc/programming language he is doing for Amiga Inc. "Expect familiar beginner friendly syntax and semantics coupled with multimethods, automatic memory management without garbage collection (linearity), powerful datatypes, pattern matching, strong and dynamic typing living together in harmony, integrated access to all the new Amiga OS features, and optional compiled output comparable to C in speed and size."
Post a Comment
Thanks for posting this interesting interview. I'm hoping to use this language when it finally appears, so any information is of interest.
So good to see that Amiga are making a come back. Can`t wait to use OS5.x and AmigaDE on the new Zico specs (PPC etc,). Then finally I can get rid of this Windows "pap" and run a real stable OS like AmigaOS. Got to rush! - I got a morris dancing lesson!
This Wouter van Oortmerssen guy, really sounds like he know the strenghts an weaknesses of his language, nice to hear from someone who doesn't try to push his product in all directions. Looking forward to check it (and AmigaDE)out, hope it's easy to learn:) Regards Troels E -Looking forward to an Amiga comback:)
Great to see that SHEEP isnt turning out like haskel. I saw some code when they first started writing it and it looked like haskel, which i absolutly HATE. SHEEP will be great for Amiga. I hear AREXX was a brilliant script and i never used it but seems like the idea of being able to do what AREXX did is a great idea. I dont know if I shall use SHEEP much on AmigaOS5x86. Hell, i dont even know if it will be there. Who knows how the DE will be integrated into the AmigaOS. But i sure wouldnt mind having a look at it.
ARexx is good mainly because it appeared early in the Amiga's history, so that all good programs can be scripted with the same language. That makes it easy to write a single script that uses the facilities of 2 or 3 programs. For example, you could call up a 3D renderer from a DTP program to generate some 3D text for a headline. Also, some programs, such as the Bars&Pipes sequencer, can send ARexx commands to another program at a specified time. This gives powerful control for multimedia applications. In principle, I believe Applescript ought to be able to do the same things, but it arrived too late, by which time programs such as Director had their own private scripting language. SHEEP will be there at the beginning of the AmigaDE, which is good.
Recently we have been having doubts that Amica Inc can pull off the seemingly impossible and relaunch the next Amiga with supporting the hardware and software, not just vaporware.
Since this is a recent interview, I want to hope the plans are still on track...`cos Sheep sounds great!
I`d love to write some server side stuff in this, on an AmigaOne (or AmigaTwo 
and see how it compares to Java for speed and flexiability.
Well, SHEEP is being written for the DE, not for AmigaOS. At present the Tao-based OS and the AmigaOS are completely different and isolated from each other. Although there are plans announced for "merging" the two, IMO this will be very difficult and will take a long time. They have nothing in common, and neither has memory management etc or is remotely to be considered as a server OS. I expect to use Perl for Server side scripting for the foreseeable future.
It already comes with the Amiga Software Development Kit which is available right now (version 1.01 with better soon to come) see http://www.amiga.com/">Amiga for details and to find a distributer.
This sounds like it is going to be a very nice programming language, i'd love to hear more about SHEEP as work on it continues to progress...
