Anders Hejlsberg @ Oct 3 GOTO Aarhus: Mysterious Announcement ?

Im hoping that MS have cracked the ILtoJS story and thus Anders and Eric Mejer would be perfect for defining how this .NET/JS landscape would look like from a language perspective!

Huh, I believe Anders' tool will SAVE US FROM writing JavaScript.

JavaScript is the assembly language, right ?

exactly my point, turn JS/HTML/CSS (web) into just an assembly layer, let the tooling/compiler generate that mess.. I can't see why we arnt there yet, im guessing we are very close!

1 hour ago, LiquidBoy wrote

exactly my point, turn JS/HTML/CSS (web) into just an assembly layer, let the tooling/compiler generate that mess.. I can't see why we arnt there yet, im guessing we are very close!

Two reasons I can think of right away ... debugging the generated JavaScript and graphics.  The paper referenced in this thread (well, the photo), is one solution.  I am not so sure they are going to do IL to JS anymore ... but they may have another approach. ...

Another interesting thing I overlooked, Steven Edward Lucco will also be there:

http://gotocon.com/aarhus-2012/speaker/Steve+Lucco

And his presentation is also not disclosed yet, 'JavaScript 5' is not EcmaScript 5, it only means its the 5th presentation in the JavaScript track.

And he doesn't even have a biography. fortunately, someone saved a copy from microsoft.com

Steven E. Lucco is currently the chief architect for the Microsoft Browser Programmability and Tools (BPT) team. BPT builds the Internet Explorer's Chakra Javascript script engine, as well as the Visual Studio tools for creating scalable, efficient Web client applications.

So he is also the JavaScript engine/tooling guy, and formerly a .NET/CLR guy, coincidence ?

Hmm.... what is this server side thing from BPT ? https://careers.microsoft.com/jobdetails.aspx?jid=75392

This doesn't smell like simple node.js tools like anodejs.org or even Azure SDK for node.js to me, something else ?

Reminds me of WebSharper

http://www.websharper.com/

Perhaps it's similar but for C# and VB?

uhoh, apparently I was thinking too much again

The presentation of Steve Lucco is actually about Chakra, nothing mysterious.

Still interesting nontheless though, I hope it will be recorded and published on InfoQ.com

OK. S. Somasegar has confirmed that Anders is working on JavaScript stuff, "thinking about this more from the language and tools perspective".

http://www.zdnet.com/whats-microsofts-father-of-cs-next-trick-7000004226/

So, as we narrowed down the possibilities, let me try it once more, with speculations going full steam ahead.

Assumtions:
1, Anders doesn't like coding in JavaScript directly, at all.
2, Its unlikely that Anders will invent a new language like Dart/CoffeeScript.
3, Simply put MSIL2JS there is not optimal, so its more about tooling.

So, as Roslyn has a scripting API, with fully dynamic REPL support, maybe we will see a Roslyn based client-side web development environment, provides Edit&Refresh dev experience, using C#/VB or C#Script(csx)/VBScript(vbx) as the development language, MSIL2JS as compiler backend, TypeProvider-like dynamic integration of data sources and Web API, Razor-like HTML mixing, etc. Now the question is, does it support XAML ?????

So, Steve Lucco for the runtime (Chakra), Erik Meijer for the bridge (MSIL2JS), Anders for the language and tooling (Roslyn), three pillars of something ?

But a more impotant question is, how will this deliver more value than http://sharpkit.net/ or http://www.componentart.com/products/mds/ ???

OK, as Charles said, its all about fun, but there is definetely more fun for hits than misses, so lets wait and see, 20 days to go.

Oh no, Microsoft might be actually 'innovating' on the JavaScript language itself, oh no no it cant be ...

On Jomo Fisher's linkedin page: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jomof

Senior Software Engineer (JavaScript Team)
Microsoft
September 2010 – January 2012 (1 year 5 months) JavaScript Language Team
Most recently, my work has been on the JavaScript programming language. My focus has been on performance and language innovation. I will post more details as they are made public by Microsoft.

Javascript is kind of crazy. You have a language that is interpreted by all kinds of virtual machines with all kinds of performance characteristics. Just think about the simple case of string concatenation. You can join(), concat(), += etc. Each method has different performance characteristics on each of dozens of different variations of virtual machines.

It would be nice to have something like SuperPreview for JavaScript.

-Josh

A new JavaScript Language Service in VS 2012 Update1. It will include a full-program Hindley-Milner type inferencing engine, similar to F#. The current C# compiler only supports method-based type inferencing.

Think of it as the Roslyn front-end AST implementation but only utilizing the C# 'dynamic' bits.

This will allow the Visual Studio front end to provide the 'smarts' needed for large program maintainability that Anders has previously identified as and issue. For example, better lint checking and industry-leading refactoring support.

As the Windows team commit to even better WinJS support, this is a vital component in the toolchain.

Anders hejlsberg, Joe Duffy & others in new patent calling out possible .net concurrency changes !  "TYPE SYSTEM SUPPORT FOR MEMORY ISOLATION PERMISSIONS"   http://www.google.com/patents/US20100262801?printsec=abstract#v=onepage&q&f=false 

@rbirkby: Eh, that kind of work sounds like MSR TechReports to me, instead of products from Anders.

Especially, some work from Nikhil Swamy or Ben Livshits

http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=168635
http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=161885
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/nswamy/supp/index.html

if even somebody can improve js dev experience, then only Anders as lead