Microsoft announces VisualLisp#?
Tuesday, August 9, 2005
Don Box was well known for his work on COM, XML and SOAP even before he came on board at Microsoft as a senior architect for the web services development efforts at Microsoft. He's a pretty smart guy and I read his blog on a regular basis. However, I was shocked to read the following on his weblog today (in an entry titled "Lisp/Scheme Jobs"):
"My old friend Ted Pattison used to say that C++ programmers were the smartest programmers on Earth - if you didn't believe him you could ask any C++ programmer and they'd tell you themselves.My reaction to reading this was "What the @!#$ is this about?"! What would Microsoft be announcing at their PDC developers conference that would be Lisp related? My first thought was that it might be something that was related to C Omega, a research language that extends the C# programming language with new asynchronous concurrency abstractions. But (although Lisp has strong credentials in concurrency from a historical POV), that's probably more of an Erlang "told you so" than a Lisp one. Now, I think it's more likely that they'll be announcing something related to continuation support in C#. Just another example of Greenspuning in action in the corporate world. Ho hum.
As a former C++ programmer who had a mid-life conversion to Scheme and Lisp, I have to say, this old joke applies to Lisp in spades. The difference is when a Lisp programmer tells you he's smarter, he's usually right.
I expect more than our fair share of "I told you so's" from the Lisp world in mid-September."
Update-2005-08-11: Sam Griffith had a look at the PDC session descriptions and thought that the following might give some more clues as to what Don Box was talking about:
C#: Future Directions in Language Innovation from Anders Hejlsberg
Speaker(s): Anders Hejlsberg
Join Anders Hejlsberg, Distinguished Engineer and chief architect of the C# language, for an in-depth walkthrough of the new language features in C# 3.0. Understand how features like extension methods, lambda expressions, type inference, and anonymous types make it possible to create powerful APIs for expressing queries and interacting with objects, XML, and databases in a strongly typed, natural way. It is suggested that you attend "The .NET Language Integrated Query Framework: An Overview" before attending this session.
Session Type(s): Breakout
Session Level(s): 300
Track(s): Tools & Languages
