Yes it is. One of the authors seems to be an "internal software development coach" (source: http://www.geekinasuit.com/2009/03/hiatus-should-be-over.htm...) at Google. The other author's blog seems to be down atm (http://jakeherringbone.com/).
The developers work at Google on their internal tools team, focusing particularly on unit testing. Hence, the inspiration for a language that's like Java but with Guice (Google's DI framework) and without the ability to shoot yourself in the foot in the ways that Java makes it particularly easy to.
Noop is a 20% time project for the developers. So, there's a tacit endorsement by Google, but it's not as if Google has staffed up a full-time team to deliver a new language that will be used throughout their organization any time soon. The developers don't expect to get much adoption for Noop, and hope that it will mainly influence people's thinking and other tools.
They say, this is made by google, and up to now, the google announcements I saw were very solid projects. Did I miss a lot of google announcements which are not solid projects?
On the other hand, the state of this language looks... early? I am not sure. I don't see much code (yes, those 40 lines linked to on this page really show the new and innovative powers of this language), and I do see a lot of 'we propose this and we want that' (+ the usual language buzzwords), which feels much more like a language brainstorm, or maybe the state where the results of the brainstorming are settling down... but nowhere near a solid project...
So, sorry to sound very unexcited, but at this point.. who cares about yet another language in a very, very early state?
You mean like Wave?
but there's scarcely anything there. Which is all rather weird; I'd have thought that (1) one of the first things you do when designing a language is to mock up a load of example code to see how your ideas work together, and (2) you want to make that available to anyone looking at your language so that they can get a feel for what it's meant to be like. Oh well.
I am surprised this got onto the jvmlang conference agenda at this stage of its implementation. Lots of announced buzzword-y goals and very little code.
The blurb (In the absence of substantial code samples the blurb is all one has to go by) sounds like it is a language encoding "best practices" - all very nice and enterprisey.
It will be interesting to watch the progress or otherwise of this language
Too bad you couldn't make the JVM summit. I would have been interested in a session on the language powering "After the Deadline" than this piece of almost-vapourware.
Edit: Just checked if it is April 1st, but nope, it isn't. They must be serious.
