Erik Meijer: Democratizing the Cloud | AdamKinney

erik_
Tablet Power

Interesting video! Thanks.

Harlequin
http://twitter.com/TrueHarlequin

You need to add a photo of him at the PDC Universal party at the Fear Factor Live!

I shall say no more....hehe Tongue Out

Andrew Davey
www.aboutcode.net

Great video! Erik, you are a legend!

I would love to see Microsoft get more behind some of the .NET languages developed outside of Redmond. Languages like Boo and Nemerle have great features like type inference, duck typing, first class functions, syntactic macros and much more.
The only thing holding these languages back is the lack of tool support i.e. Visual Studio.
Whilst some of the advanced features may be beyond VB Mort's, they allow those in the know to be very productive. The result is better code developed, which in turn can be consumed by the business-level developers.
I personally see Nemerle as a potential successor to C#. It can look and feel just like C#, but allows so much more expressiveness if you want it.

nemisys
You Know

Microsoft marketing innovation at work

Ion Todirel
buuu

nemisys wrote:

Microsoft marketing innovation at work

haha, i thought this is one of the Jamie's

Minh
WOOH! WOOH!

Dynamic languages is a great topic, so, just a gripe ...

If you're gonna title a video "Democratizing the Cloud" .... you should really talk about democratizing the cloud.

Charles
Welcome Change

Minh wrote:
Dynamic languages is a great topic, so, just a gripe ...

If you're gonna title a video "Democratizing the Cloud" .... you should really talk about democratizing the cloud.

We do... But, yeah, perhaps we could have spent more time explicitly addressing the work his incubation team is currently doing....
C

Ssmoimo

Well, I have to say that there are some pretty good ideas, but overall this is completely the wrong direction. This is the equivalent of META Perl. Diversification of languages is a bad thing. When you look at it at the meta level, it suffers the same afflications as Perl.

Too many ways to do the same thing!

Developing code is easy. That is not the hard part of a project. We don't need dynamic typing, we don't need duck typing! (That is horrible!)

The hard part is writing GOOD code. Solid code. Most projects spend 80% of the project in the defect fixing and support phase. Strong typing, may make a little more difficult to originally develop the code, but it results in better code that is more robust AND the compiler does the work of finding your bugs for you.

The single biggest cost in any software development project is fixing defects. We need to go more and more towards the direction of strong typing and one langauge. Not the other direction.

I like some of the ideas here, but I really hope Microsoft does not come even close to going this direction. VB.NET, while it has its good aspects, has caused some of the most expensive software development problems in the world. The ease of use, results in misuse and undertrained developers taking on tasks bigger than they should and not learning enough to write good maintainable code.

Andrew Davey
www.aboutcode.net

I dislike weak typing, at least in the form that VB gives us. There are languages that allow types to change at runtime (adding methods, etc) but I never really found the need for that feature. For me type inference is the big winner. Both VB and C# are getting this in next version. It means much simpler code to read and write, whilst still having the safety of the compiler.
I always thought it strange to discard years of advanced compiler and type systems design!

I hope the next version of VB does have the "Dynamic Interface" feature. It provides the best way to program against weakly typed objects. It lets the all your code be strongly typed to the interface, however at runtime you can attempt to cast any object type you want to it. I believe the runtime will then check the validity of the object upfront - so you get fail fast, rather than fail half way through some nasty computation due to mis-spelling a function!