Anders Hejlsberg and Guy Steele: Concurrency and Language Design

Posted By: Charles | Oct 6th, 2008 @ 6:27 AM | 79,635 Views | 19 Comments
This is the second year I've been lucky enough to take part in the cross-platform software engineering conference JAOO. Like last year, I was very fortunate to get to sit down with a few key players in the programming languages design field and watch several technical presentations that span the industry and problems we face as software developers. One of the truly great things about JAOO is that it is not a product-focused conference: it's about programming first and foremost and enables the sharing of perspectives and ideas among the world's best and brightest programming minds. As you can imagine, I, like many technical types here at Microsoft, am a huge fan of JAOO. Thank you Trifork!!!

In this conversation Microsoft Technical Fellow and Chief Architect of C# Anders Hejlsberg sits down with programming language design legend and computer scientist Guy Steele (creator of Scheme and expert in several languages ranging from LISP to Java). I think Guy is one of the smartest people I've ever met.

The topic of conversation is the elephant in the modern general purpose programmer's living room: Concurrency. With today's widely-used general purpose languages like C++, Java, C#, VB, Ruby etc it's hard to express parallelism in productive ways. Anders et al are working on both language enhancements to C# and VB.NET and BCL support (Parallel Extensions to .NET for example). Today, Guy is working on a mathematical language (domain specific as opposed to general purpose) and runtime, Fortress, that is so concurrent it makes it hard for programmers to even write sequential code!

Listen in to two of the programming industry's most successful thinkers and get a sense of their perspectives on the future of general purpose programming languages now that Concurrency and Parallelism are entering the development status quo.

Enjoy. More JAOO coverage to come. You can watch Anders' keynote on language futures here.
Rating:
3
0
#Oct 7th, 2008 @ 1:06 AM
vesuvius
vesuvius
Das Glasperlenspiel
What a completely illuminating and edifying interview. I can say with certainty that I will watch this again and again and again.
#Oct 7th, 2008 @ 2:11 AM
iparag
iparag
iParag.com
Great Discussion. I tend to think the more functional stuff added to C#(Anders seems to suggest that!), the more polluted it's going to be. C# shouldn't be answers to all the problems, it's about time they don't try to make it that way!

No matter how much functional programming is useful, current languages will still be alive and kicking!
#Oct 7th, 2008 @ 2:17 AM
Charles
Charles
Welcome Change
Great points. In fact, this is exactly what we are doing with Parallel Extensions for .NET and language/runtime changes in our stack. As Anders states in the video we don't expect developers to throw away their current toolset. Instead, we'll add new constructs to the existing tools to make writing concurrent code productive and effective. Of course, a fair amount of magic needs to happen to pull this off and Anders et al are working very hard at it!

C
#Oct 7th, 2008 @ 3:30 AM
vesuvius
vesuvius
Das Glasperlenspiel
I thought both seemed to extol F# and pretty much say "if you want functional, then that (F#) is what you want to use".

The appeal of functional programming to Anders (it seems) is when it comes to parallelize your code. The task parallel library is already working on a parallel for-loop. The next logical step in code, is any method where a time consuming task is present (work need to be done) like your lambdas. I think that that is why Anders extols functional programming, insofar as "the elephant in the room" and functional programming being used as a tool in concurrency issues.

I therefore see C# developing as a hybrid language or creating a hybrid developer, whereby if any parallel tasks need to be done, the best practice in your application is to use functional constructs, as they can be made to run in parallel. Learning F# is going to be the best way for .NET developers to leverage their existing .NET knowledge, without resorting to the extremes and complexity of Haskell.
#Oct 7th, 2008 @ 3:58 PM
AnneDK
AnneDK
If you would like to see more videos with Anders Hejlsberg you can find a video of his JAOO keynote at the JAOO Community Blog. The blog also features an interview with Anders Hejlsberg.
#Oct 7th, 2008 @ 9:12 PM
littleguru
littleguru
<3 Seattle
Awesome awesome content! Thanks for doing this Charles!
#Oct 9th, 2008 @ 2:10 AM
elmer
elmer
I'm on my very last life.

I walked away from the video while it was running, and was suddenly struck by Guy Steel's voice... Carl Sagan talking computers.

...LOL.

#Nov 16th, 2008 @ 10:40 AM
rbirkby
rbirkby
Anders used to be a Distinguished Engineer. But I think they changed the title to Technical Fellow when one of the Distinguished Engineers had a chair thrown at him.
#Nov 24th, 2008 @ 7:35 AM
danielearwicker
danielearwicker
Isn't C# great?
That point about a base language that can support different syntaxes though library-like extensions - surely that has to be the way to go, in the long term?

We already have an ever-growing range of APIs in the CLR to let us dynamically compile code snippets into executables. The C# and VB compilers are "libraries" in that sense. They need to be reusable in different contexts, e.g. partial compilation for IDE intellisense as well as the "real" compilation process. And so why not implement those two languages as AST processors on the same general compilation engine. And then introduce a way to let you switch syntax libraries in the middle of a file, or in an expression.
Microsoft Communities