Boffins at Carnegie Mellon University, sponsored by the US’s number one spying outfit, has come up with a programming Esperanto which unites all different programming languages under a single umbrella.
Any excitement about the development is that since it is funded by the NSA it will be full of backdoors which can harvest personal details on behalf of the US government, but you can still admire the technology.
Dubbed Wyvern which was a mythical dragon-like thing that only has two legs instead of four it helps programmers design apps and websites without having to rely on a whole bunch of different stylesheets and different amalgamations spread across different files.
Jonathan Aldrich, the researcher developing the language, wrote in his blog that Web applications are written as a poorly-coordinated mishmash of artifacts written in different languages, file formats, and technologies. For example, a web application may consist of JavaScript code on the client, HTML for structure, CSS for presentation, XML for AJAX-style communication, and a mixture of Java, plain text configuration files, and database software on the server.
“This diversity increases the cost of developers learning these technologies. It also means that ensuring system-wide safety and security properties in this setting is difficult, he said.
This creates security problems, which was why the NSA was interested. After all it has protect its own systems from hackers.
Wyvern can automatically tell what language a person is programming in, based solely on the type of data that’s being manipulated. That means that if the language detects you are editing a database, for instance, it’ll automatically assume you’re using SQL. The language is still a prototype and is all open saucy
