Brian Beckman: Monads, Monoids, and Mort

Posted By: Charles | Aug 29th, 2006 @ 10:34 AM

Brian Beckman is a fascinating individual. Ex-cosmologist, ex-military operating system and simulation developer (have you ever considered processes that move both forward and backward in time? Well, Brian and team at JPL created just that. He explains in this interview...). Brian was one of the first members of Microsoft Research and one of a group of physicists who joined Microsoft in the early 90s. At Microsoft he is a passionate advocate for Mort, the somewhat ambiguous class name for novice developers. In fact, he considers himself a mort (somewhat hard to believe, honestly, but we'll go along with it...). His team works on innovative incubation projects that turn into developer platform features (like LINQ, for example) and more. Tune in to this very interesting interview.

Brainbec's Weblog

Tags: ADO.NET, Brian Beckman, LINQ, Monads, MS Personalities, MS Research, Software Composability, VB.NET

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taluis

At 27:00 into the interview, Mr. Beckman says:

"We want to turn Visual Basic into not only the best and most popular programming language in the world but the most advanced programming language in the world."

Wow! What an incredible statement. It even took Charles by surprise. Microsoft Research favoring VB over C#! That's got to turn the .NET programming community on its ear.

Ion Todirel
ban...kai

Mr. Beckman wrote:

We want to turn Visual Basic into not only the best and most popular programming language in the world but the most advanced programming language in the world.

right, there are not such thing as "the best programming language"! Microsoft Research guys should know this better that anyone, advanced... would be nice to explain how... and sience C#/VB share same runtime how VB can be more advanced than C# ?

raymond

taluis wrote:

At 27:00 into the interview, Mr. Beckman says:

"We want to turn Visual Basic into not only the best and most popular programming language in the world but the most advanced programming language in the world."

Wow! What an incredible statement. It even took Charles by surprise. Microsoft Research favoring VB over C#! That's got to turn the .NET programming community on its ear.

Want to bet Carl Franklin will get an audio clip of this and air it on his next show on .NET Rocks?

I recommend both C#, VB.NET, JavaScript, and T-SQL if you are looking for a .NET position. I will be trying Ruby soon as well.

Cool

Position August 2006	Position August 2005	Delta in Position	Programming Language	Ratings August 2006	Delta August 2005	Status
1	1		Java	22.377%	+1.17%	A
2	2		C	17.430%	-2.04%	A
3	6		(Visual) Basic	11.195%	+3.44%	A
4	3		C++	10.254%	-0.26%	A
5	5		PHP	9.639%	+1.77%	A
6	4		Perl	5.313%	-4.57%	A
7	8		Python	3.071%	+0.19%	A
8	7		C#	2.683%	-0.80%	A
9	10		Delphi	2.162%	+0.40%	A
10	9		JavaScript	2.019%	+0.10%	A
11	11		SAS	1.986%	+0.69%	A
12	13		PL/SQL	1.151%	+0.19%	A
13	28	15 *	Ruby	0.804%	+0.54%	A--
14	21	7 *	Visual FoxPro	0.631%	+0.20%	A-
15	15		VB.NET	0.619%	-0.06%	B
16	14		Lisp/Scheme	0.586%	-0.10%	B
17	12		COBOL	0.561%	-0.48%	B
18	18		Ada	0.554%	+0.05%	B
19	19		Pascal	0.510%	+0.02%	B
20	29	9 *	D	0.456%	+0.20%	B

http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm

efortier

I'm trying to figure out how to spell the name of the programming Brian keeps mentionning, Askel, askl... What's the correct name?

Thanks Charles, what a great interview (again!). Boy, some people at Microsoft makes me feel so clueless! And that Timewarp OS stuff is one of the craziest thing I hear about.

--Eric

PS: answering my own post: "Haskell" Wink

Charles
Welcome Change

efortier wrote:

I'm trying to figure out how to spell the name of the programming Brian keeps mentionning, Askel, askl... What's the correct name?

Thanks Charles, what a great interview (again!). Boy, some people at Microsoft makes me feel so clueless! And that Timewarp OS stuff is one of the craziest thing I hear about.

--Eric

PS: answering my own post: "Haskell"

Glad you liked the conversation. I know I did!
C

staceyw
Before C# there was darkness...

Great video. Very interesting. Bit sad c# will not get some of these features. Please add the link(s) to blogs and so forth. Thanks!

jason818_253.33
Yippi skippy

Thanks for the great video. Monads and Monoids - complex.

Charles
Welcome Change

staceyw wrote:

Great video. Very interesting. Bit sad c# will not get some of these features. Please add the link(s) to blogs and so forth. Thanks!

Here you go
C

mawcc
Make it so

Ion Todirel wrote:

Mr. Beckman wrote: We want to turn Visual Basic into not only the best and most popular programming language in the world but the most advanced programming language in the world.
right, there are not such thing as "the best programming language"! Microsoft Research guys should know this better that anyone, advanced... would be nice to explain how... and sience C#/VB share same runtime how VB can be more advanced than C# ?

C# 3.0 also targets the same runtime but is more advanced than C# 2.0. You can do a lot just by improving the compiler alone. So if more effort is put in the VB compiler in the future it will get more advanced than C#, although both target the same runtime.