1. Introduction

Lect is a powerful, general-purpose, object-oriented programming language, intended for production use in commercial and free software. It compiles to a platform-neutral intermediate representation, and is then typically optimized and linked. JIT features are also supported. Lect is memory-managed but not garbage-collected, and its performance and footprint are comparable to C/C++.

Lect is free and open-source, usable under the Apache 2 license. It is not controlled by any vendor.

Lect’s sweet spot is complex software that exists across releases, has multiple maintainers, and uses many of the capabilities of modern hardware and fabrics. Lect may be usable in quick-and-dirty scripting, and by one-person dev teams, but this is not where it shines the most.

Lect borrows liberally from other modern programming languages–notably, python, C++, java, C#, go, and D. Given the wide acceptance and deep thought behind these languages, one might wonder why lect is needed. Don’t we have everything we need, already?

1.1 Why lect?

Complexity is at the heart of the answer. Since C++ was invented in 1979, waves of innovation have complicated the hardware, software, and human landscape in which software development takes place:

• dramatically faster chips
• the maturation of RDBMS technology
• the explosion of storage capacity
• solid-state drives
• cheap RAM
• the internet
• GPUs, MICs, and FPGAs
• virtualization
• the death of long-lived careers at a single company
• FOSS
• malicious hacking
• web apps
• SOAP and RESTful web services
• unicode
• distributed architectures
• cloud computing
• big data
• NoSQL and NewSQL
• the ebb and flow of outsourcing trends
• MMORPGs
• social networks
• the mobile revolution
• battles over privacy and intellectual property
• BYOD
• TPMs
• TLS, IPSec, and other security protocols
• ipv6

... and so forth. Whew!

Programming languages have matured as well. The modern descendants of C (and languages with different genealogies) embody many innovations in syntax, toolset, libraries, and community. Nonetheless, these languages have at best achieved a stalemate with complexity. We may have learned a bit about agile processes and TDD, and we may have more powerful IDEs and debuggers, but the average programmer today has to specialize in a corner of the software universe if she or he has any hopes of mastery. Off-by-one errors and race conditions are still with us; unhandled exceptions and null pointers are about as common as they were decades ago. Besides leaking pointers, we now have to worry about security vulnerabilities and optimization at exascale. Creating sophisticated, living ecosystems of cooperating applications is possible, but enormously difficult.

Lect harnesses complexity for programmers, promoting fearless and empowered creativity to solve the next generation of the world’s problems. This is its “why”.

1.2 How lect’s different

Delivering on this goal is no easy proposition, and skeptics would be right to wonder if lect offers anything that’s truly new. Is it just another way to say, “Hello, world”?

Yes and no.

Lect enthusiastically borrows syntax and structural notions from other languages. We already have concise notation for arrays and bit twiddling and inheritance and generics. Why reinvent the wheel? In these respects, lect is just a pleasant amalgam of best-of-breed solutions.

However, a lot of the semantics in lect are fresh. Lect didn’t invent them, as a general rule, but by embodying advanced concepts in a vocabulary and a pattern of expression, it opens up new possibilities for the coder. Lect lets you talk about the deployment strategy of an ecosystem, about the stages of an application’s lifecycle, about how many instances of a particular class are likely to exist, about how threads interact. And as any marriage therapist will attest, talking about issues is the beginning of turning problems into opportunities. :-)

Lect strives to keep common and correct behavior automatic, corner cases possible, and inconsistent or unsafe choices disallowed–while expressing a programmer’s intent with terse precision. This takes much of the busy work out of writing code, makes bugs less likely, and facilitates teamwork.

1.3 What’s in a name?

The suffix “lect” is used in linguistics to denote a language variant that’s associated with a particular place or group. Folks from a particular ethnic background might share an “ethnolect”. Members of a society might share a “sociolect.” A single person has a characteristic and unique variation of the common language called an “idiolect.”

Lect aims to be the preferred language variant of accomplished software craftsmen–those who dream of using computers to solve the most ambitious problems we can imagine.

By alluding to linguistics in its name, lect acknowledges the need for rich, living semantics that speak to people, not just a syntax that compilers can render into CPU instructions. As Martin Fowler observed in Refactoring, “Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.”

1.4 Conventions

Conventions are a way for the lect community to build and propagate a unique culture.

1.4.1 Logo

Lect is identified by a logo–the “fractal fern”:

This logo was chosen because of the following resonance:

• A fern is a complex and beautiful form of life, but it is familiar, not flashy. The principles for keeping one growing and healthy are simple. A fern’s requirements are modest.
• Lect draws much inspiration from patterns observed in living systems.
• The fern shows the golden ratio, which is suggestive of balance and proportion.
• The fern also looks like a fractal. Fractals embody infinite complexity and recurring patterns in terse, distilled formulas.

1.4.2 Colors

Obviously, the world will talk about lect in whatever color scheme it chooses. But have you noticed how javaland is often red-on-white (due to Oracle’s influence), or layers of blue (due to javadoc’s default output)? Have you noticed that python is blue and white, or blue and cyan?

In all of lect’s internal materials, we’ll use a color scheme like the one in this documentation: white, with a main accent that’s green, and secondary accents in blue and gray. This goes well with the fractal fern. Members of the community are encouraged to use similar choices where applicable.

1.4.3 Animal

It has been fashionable in recent years to associate programming languages with an animal. Perl gets a camel; python gets its namesake. However, lect has no mascot other than the fractal fern.

1.4.4 Spelling

The name of the language is only capitalized when title or sentence position require it. In the middle of a sentence, just say “lect” without capitalizing.

1.4.5 Slang

In the python community, best practice is described as “pythonic.” For fans of REST, a well designed web service is “RESTful.” In the lect community, slang plays with “el” words or words that have “lect” in them:

• “My first solution was a bit of a kludge. Any advice about the electrical way to do it?”
• “Dude! That makes it so much faster! Your tweak is delectable!”
• “I need an electrician to give me advice about this program.”
• (in a discussion about porting to lect) “I’m not sure whether that C++ code is eligible.”
• “Tomorrow I start a new project, and I get to pick the programming language. Election day!”