Designed by Tim Burks Typing discipline dynamic | Developer Tim Burks | |
First appeared 2007; 10 years ago (2007) Stable release 2.1.0 / April 15, 2013; 3 years ago (2013-04-15) | ||
Nu is an interpreted object-oriented programming language, with a Lisp-like syntax, created by Tim Burks as an alternative scripting language to program OS X through its Cocoa application programming interface (API). Implementations also exist for iPhone and Linux.
The language was first announced at C4, a conference for indie Mac developers held in August 2007.
Considered a niche tool, possibly because of its Lisp-like syntax, it is notable as part of a rise in use of functional programming languages as of 2014.
Example code
This Nu code defines a simple complex numbers class.
The example is a basic definition of a complex number: it defines the instance variables, and a method to initialize the object. It shows the similarity between the code in Nu and the equivalent in Objective-C; it also shows the similarity with Ruby.
This sample, from the nuke tool bundled with Nu, also shows the influence of Objective-C, Lisp, and Ruby in the design of the language.