My influences

It wouldn’t be fair to say QED, with its unique parallel syntax, sprung from itself, without any influence. First, this is most totally wrong and second, I really want to pay homage to the languages that influenced it: C, C++, Java and BASIC (yes, I’m serious).

If you look at QED code without GUI attributes, it looks almost similar to C. Plain functions, no classes or methods, statements surrounded by curly braces… Syntactically speaking, QED retains the clarity of C code we love.

However, QED is object-oriented, so it borrows from C++ some features like multiple inheritance and the colon syntax for extending functions.

From Java, QED retains and extends the WORA paradigm. QED runs on its own VM like Java. This VM runs in both native and web modes, which allows QED application to run seamlessly in both environments.

BASIC? At first glance, it’s like inviting Maleficient with the three fairies (Java, Seeplusplus and See) to the party! But what is QED first and foremost? A simple language, for beginners and experts, with built-in graphics primitives and animation facilities, using subroutines (functions) to implement sequential tasks and screens. This is BASIC in essence, but QED strips the BASIC quirks and shortcomings and fulfills today and tomorrow’s requirements.

I would tend to say QED “brings back the fun of programming”, but this has been said so many times before from other language designers that I just can’t follow them. Besides, QED is oriented towards the future, not the past. I am more inclined to say that QED is a language for today’s budding programmers (experts are welcome too!) who want to develop great looking real-world applications. I see QED as a modern-day BASIC replacement.

I would love to add more influences to the list, especially from more modern languages (type inference may be a good start). We’ll see how things go.