In the last number of years there has been a boom in the creation of new computer languages. Some might wonder why we need so many new languages but one thing I have found is that software developers can be very passionate about software languages.
Another gratifying trend is the ‘almost natural’ step for language communities to provide tooling support based 0n Eclipse. One of the highlights at EclipseCon 2012 is the opportunity to learn and see the support being developed for many of these languages. A quick summary of the language support you can see at EclipseCon 2012:
Dart is a new web programming language being developed at Google. Some see Dart as a structured version of JavaScript or even a JavaScript replacement. Dart in Action is a session led by Dan Rubel from Google who is working on a Dart Editor based on Eclipse
Lua might not be a new language but it certainly seems to be gaining momentum, especially in the embedded and M2M industry. Lua tooling on steroids will demonstrate the current status of the Eclipse Koneki project which aims to provide a first-class Lua IDE.
Ceylon is a new JVM based language, developed at RedHat, positioned as a language for writing large programs in a team environment. Ceylon – the language and its tools should give a nice overview of the new language and the tools they have built based on Eclipse.
Xtend is another new JVM language being developed at Eclipse. In the session Eclipse Xtend – A Language for Java Developers, Sven Efftinge will be introducing Xtend to the EclipseCon attendees.
JavaScript is not a new language but the support being provided by Orion is new. There is a session and tutorial on Orion that will educate anyone interested in the future of JavaScript and web tooling at Eclipse.
If you want to learn about new languages and their tools, then EclipseCon 2012 will have be a great place to be.
Ian Skerrett 
Hi Ian,
You forgot to mention the session on the Groovy tooling in Eclipse. We will be showing some of Groovy-Eclipse’s editing support for custom DSLs. In particular, how end-users and library developers can customize the IDE without needing to write a plugin.
See http://www.eclipsecon.org/2012/sessions/light-weight-ide-extensibility-custom-dsls-groovy
It is exciting to see all of this innovation in the languages space and how it relates to the tooling. Looking forward to the conference.
Andrew,
I was thinking of adding your Groovy session but I also plan to blog about all the cool stuff we have around DSL’s and was going to include it there. Regardless, I agree you guys have done some cool stuff with Groovy and Eclipse.
Ian
Thanks. 🙂 I guess it does straddle the line of both.
Just to mention, there’s the DDT project too, which hopefully gets some momentum this year.
EGL is also a new language to Eclipse, though it’s been around for a while. Originally developed by IBM, it was moved to open source in 2011. Look for the EGL Development Tools (EDT) project on http://eclipse.org/edt. Not sure if anyone from EDT will be able to make EclipseCon this year since everyone is busy working on releases.