Mary Jo Foley on Experimental Programming Languages - and My Thoughts on the Subject
Mary Jo Foley has a pair of new articles on experimental programming languages up on Redmond Developer News.
http://reddevnews.com/news/devnews/article.aspx?editorialsid=164
http://reddevnews.com/news/devnews/article.aspx?editorialsid=167
These discuss some of the MS research /experimental languages such as A#, F#, J#, Sing#, Spec# and X# (now known as C Omega). She spoke with me above this and quoted me in the articles.
While language innovation is good and productive, I don't think that is where the major productivity gains will be made - the significant productivity gains will be made with tools and technologies, much more so than with progamming language improvements.
Do you agree ? If you were someone, let's say Microsoft, with limited resources, would you choose to spend/invest them in naguage innovations or productivity innovations in the IDE and associated tools ? Leave a comment to share your thoughts !