Anders Hejlsberg and Gilad Bracha: Perspectives on Programming Language Design | Charles

aL_
Rx ftw

cool

i watched gilads talk on hopscotch, interesting stuff Smiley

i dont agere with all of his assertions but he has really interesting insights Smiley

id love to see something with eric, his talk was great but it seemed he did a lot with his hands that didnt get captured in the video :/ that IObservable interface sounds really cool.. is it coming to .net maybe?

exoteric
I : Next<I>

In reply to aL_

#Apr 28th @ 3:06 PM

About Rx - yes, please let's see more about that. Eric Meijer - always fun and stimulating to watch.

About Gilad vs Anders - always a pleasure, Gilad has a great sense of humor, as always and Anders is a seamless pragmaticist and he is of course right that Gilad can afford and should afford himself to be on the bleeding edge. I don't necessarily think he [Gilad] is right about everything (while not disagreeing or even being able to disagree) but he is quite visionary and the notion that types should be orthogonal sounds intuitive and right on the face of it - and more right than type-unsafety should be added rather than type-safety added.

Charles
Welcome Change

You will see Erik and the lead developer for Rx, Wes Dyer, in a two part series covering Rx in the near future. And, to boot, Erik will be first up in my new Lecture series on Channel 9 Wink

We love Erik and his brilliant mind coupled with a very cool and humble personality. You will see much more Erik on C9 going forward.

Wait until you see what we have from Lang.NET 2009 with Erik and a very special guest in the next episode of E2E... Smiley

C

Charles
Welcome Change

In reply to exoteric

#Apr 28th @ 5:24 PM

Gilad is on to something very special IMHO with respect to distributed synchronizable objects built into the fabric of Newspeak. The potential is invigorating and he is blazing very new trails. You will learn much more about this in another installment of our Lang.NET coverage. Stay tuned.

Gilad rocks.

C

Kamujin

I don't have the brainpower to know who's right on the static typing debate, but as someone who's written a great deal of code in static and dynamic languages for production use, I was shocked at the suggestion that static typing does not aid reliability.

To my thinking, reliability based on code that will error at compile time is far more desirable than code that depends on developer discipline. Not because it makes coding easier, but because it frees my limited mind to be creative about far more interesting problems.

Charles
Welcome Change

In reply to Kamujin

#Apr 28th @ 6:47 PM

One possible retort to your assertion is that the static type systems you depend on (I'm assuming you're a general purpose programmer using general purpose imperative tools) are not correct by construction in and of themselves in terms of guaranteed reliability post compilation (when it really matters; during execution). Nothing guarantees that any imperative type will be 100% reliable in execution context (you expect type A as a result of a computation, but instead get an Exception E.... Sure, you can decorate your code in exeception handlers, but this doesn't help your stated case, fundamentally)

C

Kamujin

In reply to Charles

#Apr 28th @ 6:58 PM

Let's just say that your assumptions about me are wrong and leave it at that.

Charles
Welcome Change

In reply to Kamujin

#Apr 28th @ 7:14 PM

I accept being wrong all the time Smiley

The Static versus Dynamic debate lives on and certainly I agree that knowing when you've made bad assumptions during compilation is powerful. I was just taking the more extreme theoretical position in the argument for the purposes of useful discourse.

Most of us are GP imperative programmers (C, C++, C#, VB, Javascript, Python, Ruby, Java, etc) using related tooling. I meant no disrespect.

C

staceyw
Before C# there was darkness...

In reply to Charles

#Apr 28th @ 5:46 PM

"Gilad is on to something very special IMHO with respect to distributed synchronizable objects built into the fabric of Newspeak. The potential is invigorating and he is blazing very new trails. You will learn much more about this in another installment of our Lang.NET coverage. Stay tuned."

I like to hear Erik on this subject. At one time (on C9), he talked about Remoteable types and possible IRemoteable. I wonder where, if anywhere, that work is going. Look forward to Erik.

BTW-Gilad, great stuff. IMHO, you may want to spend less time and energy on the sour grapes stuff and put that energy back into code instead. It seems to have become a pattern in last few videos that you may not even notice. You could have the best product in the world in design. But if it never hits the streets, does it really matter how much better it is then xyz? As Anders says, at some point you have to ship a product.