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

The Discussion

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

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  lisp?

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  Not a chance... 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

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  Do you have a question?
  C

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  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.

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  XML is proof the universe hates us.

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  Why?

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  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

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  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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  Now that's better than just a "lisp?" reply!

  C

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  'M' is already in use as the name of an existing ANSI-Standard language (X11.1-1995) with quite a long history behind it.

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  Since when did all the hate for xml and soap start?  I missed it.  I think json is easier to look at, but did it win all around and nobody told me?  Doesn't WCF use soap at the bottom?

   

   I feel slow here, but this is about the 3rd video I have seen on M, and still don't understand what it is or why I need it?  Is this an n-tier solution.    Will I be able to write an M model (w/ types) in VS and click deploy to setup the DB (to sql or Azure)?  I assume that is the Write/Mod stuff your working on. 

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  WCF is flexible, you can configure it to use different encodings including (since 3.5 SP1) JSON.

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  May be [probably is] a fail on my part but is the Zune WMV file broken?!  Thanks.

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  Hi, can you elaborate? The file plays for me.

  C

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  What is wrong with WSDL?   Can someone elaborate what is wrong with it from the design perspective?  Consuming a service that exposes WSDL is easy to consume in Visual Studio.