Welcome to the Grace programming language. Grace is easy to use; there is nothing to install, and you can use it on almost any computer that runs a web browser. If you’re just beginning programming, check out our tutorial. If you have more experience, you can get started right away with the web-based program editor.
Using this Website
This website aims to collect the documentation about Grace and its libraries. This is the Home page; you can reach it at any time by clicking the house icon, or the words Grace Documentation, in the the blue navigation bar at the top of every page. The other items in that navigation bar give access to several different kinds of information. To find out more, click on Help in the left sidebar.
What is Grace?
Grace is a language designed specifically to make it easier for new programmers to learn to program. It’s small, concise, and amazingly powerful. If you are a beginner, you needn’t concern yourself with any of the material below, but if you are familiar with other languages, it may give you a better idea of how Grace is different.
Teaching
Grace incorporates many recent programming language advances to make your programs shorter and simpler. However, it is still quite powerful enough to write "real" programs — for example, the Grace implementation is itself written in Grace. Grace leaves out a lot of the boilerplate that lards other languages; this makes it easier for new students to focus on the essentials of programming.
Grace also allows instructors to write dialects, which are variants of Grace with specific teaching objectives. For example, there is a logo dialect for turtle graphics, and a minitest dialect for introducing test-driven programming.
Design
Grace was designed as an object-oriented language, but with significant "functional" and "procedural" sub-components. Dialects allow instructors to both add and remove features. In this way, Grace accommodates many different teaching styles.
Functionality
Grace is a full object-based language, and also includes some features that are not object-based, such as pattern matching. This enables instructors to compare various programming styles without leaving the language.
Grace has an object-oriented type system, but its use is optional. Variables and methods that are not annotated with types are assumed to have type `Unknown`, and are not checked. At the instructor's discretion, dialects can be used to require type annotations.
Other Resources
Grace has been described in several technical papers presented at international programming language conferences. The website for discussing Grace's design is gracelang.org.