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 !

 

Published Wednesday, February 21, 2007 11:39 PM by Jackie Goldstein
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Comments

Thursday, February 22, 2007 12:34 AM by foobar

# re: Mary Jo Foley on Experimental Programming Languages - and My Thoughts on the Subject

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]."

Thursday, February 22, 2007 3:20 AM by Eliyahu Goldin

# re: Mary Jo Foley on Experimental Programming Languages - and My Thoughts on the Subject

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

Thursday, February 22, 2007 3:46 AM by Jackie Goldstein

# re: Mary Jo Foley on Experimental Programming Languages - and My Thoughts on the Subject

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.

Thursday, February 22, 2007 5:45 AM by Vikram

# re: Mary Jo Foley on Experimental Programming Languages - and My Thoughts on the Subject

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

Thursday, October 18, 2007 11:46 PM by Community Blogs

# F# Programming Language to be Integrated in Visual Studio

Back in February I blogged about some of my thoughts on the experimental languages Microsoft Research