What is Newspeak?

Newspeak is a programming language in the Smalltalk/Self tradition by Gilad
Bracha,  Peter Ahe, Vassili Bykov, Eliot Miranda, Bill Maddox, and Yaron
Kashai. See http://newspeaklanguage.org/.

Newspeak is still an experimental language. Consequently, documentation for
Newspeak is incomplete. A reference implementation runs in the Squeak system. 
There appear to be two primary references:

  "The Newspeak Programming Platform" May 6, 2008
  "Newspeak Programming Language Draft Specification v0.05" Dec 11, 2009


What is Syme?

Syme is an implementation of Newspeak that runs on the Rubinius VM.

Rather than use the existing Newspeak parser, a bootstrap parser and compiler
using Ruby are being written. The disadvantage of this is the effort to ensure
that the parser matches the current implementation. The advantage is a
bootstrap system for Newspeak independent of Squeak/Smalltalk.