Why Did Huawei Build Its Own Programming Language? | Prof. Dan Ghica at OCX 2026

Description Apple has Swift. Android has Kotlin. Huawei has Cangjie. For a company that builds everything from silicon to consumer apps, a programming language isn't a vanity project, it's the glue that holds the entire hardware-software stack together. This is Prof. Dan Ghica's talk at OCX 2026, recorded live. Dan leads the Programming Languages Lab at Huawei's Edinburgh Research Centre, and in this session he walks through Cangjie (CJ) from the ground up: what it is, why it exists, and what it does that other languages don't. Highlights How Cangjie and ArkTS fit together, and what role each plays in the HarmonyOS Next ecosystem Static typing, memory safety, concurrent GC, multi-platform backends: how Cangjie stacks up against Kotlin and Swift Two features worth paying attention to: algebraic data types and effect handlers Meituan rewrote their core app in Cangjie; 80+ universities are already teaching it Dan's take on the agentic programming era: "The programming language is the new assembly. You don't need to read it, and what matters is the toolchain behind it. And that toolchain cannot be in someone else's hands."