JavaProgrammingWorld.com

Google and several other companies have intorduced a new language experiment called Noop that runs on the JVM. It tried to include all the best practices in the programming world while discouraging the the worst ones. On their Google Code site the following reasons to use Noop over other languages.

Dependency Injection changed the way we write software. Spring overtook EJB’s in thoughtful enterprises, and Guice and PicoContainer are an important part of many well-written applications today.

Automated testing, especially Unit Testing, is also a crucial part of building reliable software that you can feel confident about supporting and changing over its lifetime. Any decent software shop should be writing some tests, the best ones are test-driven and have good code coverage.

Noop is a new language that will run on the Java Virtual Machine, and in source form will look similar to Java. The goal is to build dependency injection and testability into the language from the beginning, rather than rely on third-party libraries as other languages do.

Immutability and minimal variable scope are encouraged by making final/const behavior the default and providing easy access to a functional style. Testability is encouraged by providing Dependency Injection at the language level and a compact constructor injection syntax.

Their Google Code site also has these suggestions for the use of their Noop source files:

1. Java translator: produces Java source. Allows you to use Noop without converting your codebase, but not all runtime features of the language are provided.

2. Interpreter: reads and evaluates the Noop code through an interpreter. Slower, but will have a command-line interface

3. Compiled: to Java bytecode.

Noop is part of the Apache License 2.0 code Licencse. Their getting started page is very informatiove and tells you how to get Noop installed and configured easily. Noop has an extensive features list. I can not see this replacing Java, but I do see it being the main development source for the android in the future.