Sun Microsystems seems to be getting more involved with open source - the Programming Language Research group has open sourced one more programming language. Fortress is a modern language, without any carryovers syntax legacy or features. By open sourcing it Sun hopes to rope in researchers, academicians and participants from the industry to coevolve the language.
Fortress is a new programming language designed for high-performance computing (HPC) with high programmability. In order to explore breakaway approaches to improving programmability, the Fortress design has not been tied to legacy language syntax or semantics; all aspects of HPC language design have been rethought from the ground up. As a result, we are able to support features in Fortress such as transactions, specification of locality, and implicit parallel computation, as integral features built into the core of the language.
Head over to the FAQ (via Simon Phillip) for more answers. One of the motivations of Fortress is to support parallel computation:
Fortress is designed to make parallel programming as painless as possible. Many of the core language constructs in Fortress, including function argument evaluation and “for” loops, are parallel by default. Threads can synchronize using atomic code blocks. Fortress supplements this implicit fork-join threading model with explicit futures, and provides programmers with ways to control where particular threads are run and how large objects are laid out in memory.
The Fortress site does not acknowledge about being Fortran replacement, however, it seems to be one of the aims according to Guy Steele. There is also some talk about it being better than Java, or like the interview says it is Java for scientists. The FAQ says that Fortress is a general purpose programming language suitable for massively parallel computers and smaller systems.
