E Programming Language: Write Secure Distributed Software (opens in new tab)

C came from the B language, which itself came from BCPL. In that way, the next true successor of C will have to be P, and sure enough, we have something going on here: https://plang.codeplex.com/ :)

I'm disappointed that we have more letters to go before we get to the best language ever developed. I'll probably be retired by then.

You forgot about J...

Not just that -- Mark Miller, designer of E, is also an advisor to Sandstorm.io, the parent project of Cap'n Proto:

https://sandstorm.io/about#advisors

Cap'n Proto is very much E's distributed programming concepts "ported" to other languages, and Mark helped me get the details right.

Interestingly, E takes a very different approach from standard distributed systems practices today. Most distributed programming today emphasizes stateless servers performing idempotent operations on a monolithic datastore. Stateful servers are considered too hard to get right. What E did is actually provide the vocabulary needed to be able to reason about stateful servers, so you could get them right. Stateful servers are able to achieve massively better performance, especially in terms of latency, because they don't need to hit persistent storage for every single operation. You obviously need some way to deal with machine and network failures, but E provides that.

The near and far references and promise pipelining were already in E, unless I'm misunderstanding -- I've only read one paper on AmbientTalk.

E is written by Mark Miller and is based on "capability theory". In E you can prove a piece of code is safe and capabilities are more explicit.

So in the beginning Electric Communities was going to do large-scale, distributed virtual worlds (think MMORPGs as shopping malls...) with real security. The original plan was to use Joule, but negotiations didn't work out and while waiting around a couple of engineers created a reasonable subset in this new language called java. This subset eventaully because the original E language. Crock was the slides and presentations guy of the core team, so after knowing him for a while as mostaly a non-coder it was odd to see him pop up again and have such a big impact on the javascript world.

Yes, the AmigaE compiler written by Wouter van Oortmerssen.

There's a 'portable' version available for several platforms.

http://cshandley.co.uk/portable/

That's just an unfortunate name collision; the two E languages are unrelated.