C9 Lectures

I was about to answer that Microsoft probably don't want to push a series without a motivation such as educating developers of a forth-coming paradigm-shift in the mainstream, such as functional programming, which will arguably affect a lot of developers and development tools as well and therefore require major involvement by the community at large to ensure its success.

On the other hand I see a lot of nice presentations on the Research Channel, many by Microsoft Research - or held there, which sort of begs the question: why not push these through Channel 9 as well. In particular it would be a great idea for users to be able to select topics of interest - although still letting some filtered content filter through if it is deemed important for developers (to break through one-sided thinking). So users are not flooded with games and hardcore research content after signing up but can enable everything if so inclined.

This might also make Channel 9 a kind of hybrid User, Mort* & Research hub, bringing together different disciplines and different people.

* The affectionate term used by Brian Beckman to designate the goal-oriented / vast majority of developers.

Or maybe this line of thinking is a too ambitious

This may be over the top but I created a little Channel 9 reference document for the first two lectures, just showing the REPL stuff so there should be absolutely no misunderstandings (appended it to the first lecture post as a comment). The lecture series is about the concepts but experimentation is important.

There's an editable Word document on the SkyDrive as well, so anyone should feel free to use it for personal lecture notes.

Cover image by (I'm quite sure) Jamie.