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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 !

 

4 Comments

  • No, language development is where it's at. Incredible gains can be made at the language level, far outstripping anything an IDE can offer.

    Consider this: No IDE will ever make assembler programming simple.

    There are already languages out there that make things like multithreading really, really simple. We can only wish that one day such a language will become popular.

    Some of the things in the second part make we want to break into MS labs: "There's a lot of very interesting theory about using monads or monoids as the basis for query languages instead of relational algebra [the basis for SQL]."

  • Absolutely agree with Jackie. Languages played much bigger role in 80s and 90s. Now the platform and development environment are much more significant.

  • foobar [sic],

    I would agree with you about multi-threading being something where langauge improvement would make a big difference.

    RE: assembly language - I am not claiming langauges aren't important. We have made amazing advances in languages/productivity since assembly language. But looking forward, at least in the short/medium timeframe, I'd like to see MS focus more on tools and frameworks and less on more language innovations. As someone who develops applications for a living, that is where I see the most bang for the buck.

  • But in the long RUN these improvement in langauge which is more important. This about the features like generics, LINQ which were not there in the C#1.0. These improvements do a lot.

    Its very important to improve the IDE but significant research should also go to the development of langauge

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