The New NSA-Funded Code Rolls All Programming Languages Into One

Hey, web developer dudes and dudettes: What’s your favorite programming language? Is it CSS? Is it JavaScript? Is it PHP, HTML5, or something else? Why choose? A new programming language developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University is all of those and more—one of the world’s first “polyglot” programming languages.

Sound cool? It is, except its development is partially funded by the National Security Agency, so let’s look at it with a skeptical eye.

It’s called Wyvern—named after a mythical dragon-like thing that only has two legs instead of four—and it’s supposed to help programmers design apps and websites without having to rely on a whole bunch of different stylesheets and different amalgamations spread across different files:

“Web applications today are written as a poorly-coordinated mishmash of artifacts written in different languages, file formats, and technologies. For example, a web application may consist of JavaScript code on the client, HTML for structure, CSS for presentation, XML for AJAX-style communication, and a mixture of Java, plain text configuration files, and database software on the server,” Jonathan Aldrich, the researcher developing the language, wrote. “This diversity increases the cost of developers learning these technologies. It also means that ensuring system-wide safety and security properties in this setting is difficult.”

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