Another one turns to the dark side…

In my recent entry on dynamism, I noted that one person we’ve been working a lot with lately is Erik Meijer, late of C?. Although Erik appears to be retaining a healthy dose of language agnosticism, it appears that we’ve started to turn him over to the dark side as he’s become quite enthusiastic about VB… In fact, he’s going to be giving a talk at JAOO this year on some of the stuff we’re going to be discussing at the PDC and a few speculative ideas he’s been working on beyond that. Here’s the abstract:

Moving forward, the dominant costs for IT projects are people costs more than hardware costs. Meeting business needs revolves around improving developer productivity. This provides great opportunities for language designers and compiler writers to concentrate on providing more powerful high-level programming abstractions rather than than on low-level optimizations.

This desire for more abstraction has lead to a plethora of new domain specific programming languages for manipulating data including XML with XSLT and XQuery, objects with OQL, and relational data with SQL. We argue that instead of creating such specialized languages, general purpose languages such as C# and Visual Basic should be extended with query capabilities. This allows programmers to query any form of data, using a broad notion of “collection”.

We will discuss various advancements in Visual Basic towards simplifying the development of data intensive applications. In particular we will concentrate on ways to bridge the impedance mismatches between objects, relation data, and XML and the importance of dynamism in this trend.

If you’re going to be that way in September, I’d urge you to check it out. Now Erik just needs to get that death grip power down pat and he’ll be a full-fledged VB programmer…

2 thoughts on “Another one turns to the dark side…

  1. Mike Gale

    I’m pleased to hear this.

    Erik has published papers on things that I think are critical. (I want to see languages easy to use and productivity high, including for part time programmers.)

    I hope you can get some of Erik’s dreams implemented before I stop programming!!

    Reply

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