E2E: Erik Meijer and Don Box - Perspectives on SOAP, Programming Data and M

Posted By: Charles | Oct 28th, 2009 @ 9:52 AM | 43,476 Views | 16 Comments
Don Box is a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft and has a rich history in the general purpose programming world. You remember SOAP, right? Don was one of the Gang of Four who designed SOAP. Don was also instrumental in the design and implementation of WCF. Don is currently building a new model-based data programming platform, code-named Oslo, along with a new language for describing data, M.

Erik Meijer, programming language and library designer, chats with Don about the history of SOAP, model-based programming, data and M. Don will be at PDC09 and in addition to giving his usual stellar performance as a session speaker, he will be part of the Future of Programming panel (a view into Microsoft's perspective on trends and possibilities for general purpose programming in the age of many-core and cloud computing).
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#Oct 28th, 2009 @ 12:42 PM
dot_tom
dot_tom

Sweet goodness Don and Erik at the same time? Awesome Smiley I don't suppose there's any chance that Erik could interview Chris Brumme about what he's been up to of late? Wink

#Oct 28th, 2009 @ 1:59 PM
Charles
Charles
Welcome Change

Not a chance... Smiley Sorry. Oh, and we tried. Chris really has no interest in being filmed and certainly can't talk about the specific things he's currently working on (which is the case for all private incubation happening across the company.....).

 

C

#Oct 28th, 2009 @ 2:03 PM
exoteric
exoteric
embarassingly sequential

I've been waiting for an interview with Erik, asking about M and here it is - thanks!

 

Gilad, yes - optional/layered/pluggable type-systems. There is an analogy here. Code without intrinsic types, data without intrinsic types.

 

I like M and the whole idea of representing everything in a database, including source code down to the token level.

#Oct 28th, 2009 @ 2:21 PM
GrantB
GrantB
What the hell are we supposed to use man? Harsh language?

XML is proof the universe hates us.

#Oct 28th, 2009 @ 10:31 PM
dot_tom
dot_tom

I love Don's sly C++ jokes (and I say this as someone who writes 80 / 20, C++ / C# - that's at work, at home the inverse is true [thank goodness]). I was lucky enough to see Don give a presentation during the very early days of .NET during which he talked about GC, reflection and other concepts and then finished off by turning to the audience and with a wink saying that he had a important new question that he felt that C++ developers on Windows should learn to ask: "You want fries with that?". Classic Smiley

#Oct 29th, 2009 @ 12:44 AM
RobertL
RobertL

Not really a question, but Don mentions that he felt like he was encoding a lot of stuff, and he felt he missed language support for concurrency. Then you talked about code as data, and after watching the Clojure video here on C9 I thought that perhaps Clojure.Net would be a good fit.

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