Newsqueak is a concurrent programming language

Programming language

A programming language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine and/or to express algorithms precisely....

 for writing application software

Application software

Application software, also known as an application or an "app", is computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks. Examples include enterprise software, accounting software, office suites, graphics software and media players. Many application programs deal principally with...

 for windowing system

Windowing system

A windowing system is a component of a graphical user interface , and more specifically of a desktop environment, which supports the implementation of window managers, and provides basic support for graphics hardware, pointing devices such as mice, and keyboards...

s. It was designed at Bell Labs

Bell Labs

Bell Laboratories is the research and development subsidiary of the French-owned Alcatel-Lucent and previously of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company , half-owned through its Western Electric manufacturing subsidiary.Bell Laboratories operates its...

 by Rob Pike in the late 1980s.

Newsqueak's syntax and semantics are influenced by the C language

C (programming language)

C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....

, but its approach to concurrency was inspired by C. A. R. Hoare

C. A. R. Hoare

Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare , commonly known as Tony Hoare or C. A. R. Hoare, is a British computer scientist best known for the development of Quicksort, one of the world's most widely used sorting algorithms...

's communicating sequential processes

Communicating sequential processes

In computer science, Communicating Sequential Processes is a formal language for describing patterns of interaction in concurrent systems. It is a member of the family of mathematical theories of concurrency known as process algebras, or process calculi...

 (CSP). However, in Newsqueak, channels

Channel (programming)

A Channel is a construct used in interprocess communication to represent some binding between concurrent processes. An object may be sent over a channel, and a process is able to receive any objects sent over a channel it has a reference to...

 are first-class object

First-class object

In programming language design, a first-class citizen , in the context of a particular programming language, is an entity that can be constructed at run-time, passed as a parameter, returned from a subroutine, or assigned into a variable...

s, with dynamic process creation and dynamic channel creation.

Newsqueak was developed from an earlier, smaller, language, called Squeak (not to be confused with the Smalltalk

Smalltalk

Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed, reflective programming language. Smalltalk was created as the language to underpin the "new world" of computing exemplified by "human–computer symbiosis." It was designed and created in part for educational use, more so for constructionist...

 implementation Squeak

Squeak

The Squeak programming language is a Smalltalk implementation. It is object-oriented, class-based and reflective.It was derived directly from Smalltalk-80 by a group at Apple Computer that included some of the original Smalltalk-80 developers...

). It was developed by Luca Cardelli

Luca Cardelli

Luca Cardelli is an Italian computer scientist who is currently an Assistant Director at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK. Cardelli is well-known for his research in type theory and operational semantics. Among other contributions he implemented the first compiler for the functional programming...

 and Rob Pike as a language for implementing graphical user interface

Graphical user interface

In computing, a graphical user interface is a type of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices with images rather than text commands. GUIs can be used in computers, hand-held devices such as MP3 players, portable media players or gaming devices, household appliances and...

s.

The ideas present in Newsqueak were further developed in the programming languages Alef

Alef (programming language)

The Alef programming language was designed as part of the Plan 9 operating system by Phil Winterbottom of Bell Labs.In a February 2000 slideshow, Rob Pike noted: "…although Alef was a fruitful language, it proved too difficult to maintain a variant language across multiple architectures, so we took...

, Limbo, and Go

Go (programming language)

Go is a compiled, garbage-collected, concurrent programming language developed by Google Inc.The initial design of Go was started in September 2007 by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson. Go was officially announced in November 2009. In May 2010, Rob Pike publicly stated that Go was being...

.