DDJ>Visual Basic 9.0: Looking Forward
[NOTE: Remember my "The Density of Smartness" Theory post from a while back? Not that I want to bring up a post that turned out to have the opposite effect of what I had hoped, actually offending a few people I had no intention of offending... and I most certainly had no knowledge of LINQ or XLinq at that point... but none-the-less this is pretty much the point I was trying to make...
While there are definitely other dynamics that must be accounted for (like the fact that all of those responsible for the development of LINQ and XLinq happen to have the same employer and therefore the exact same goal of world domi, errr, I mean world... ummm... PEACE! World Peace!!! (phew... barely pulled than one off, eh? eh? Hellooo....)
Ah hell, here we go again ;) Well... moving forward :)
The point is that when you put together a small group of hackers who's development language pedigree is deeper than an average months worth of post's to this blog, you get results; the results are what you both want and need; and these aforementioned results happen extremely fast...
Are they for the better good of the development community, specifically those interested in open source, open standards, open community... Well, the CLI is arguably all three of these, and Mono is a perfect example of how open source, open standards, and open community the CLI can get... So, yeah... they are.
[Quick, before you get all glary-eyed and start sending me hate-mail, if this just so happened to be Sun, or better yet, Apple, would you be annoyed, even in the slightest, if the above comments were made regarding the results of one of these two "ok fine, we'll throw some open source out there to keep the hounds at bay..." companies...
Just >> shift-the-bits >> and its amazing how one companies "evil minded priorities" are another companies charm...
Sorry, but having spent many years among the folks in Redmond, and seeing the result's of the vision of Eric Rudder and the understanding of this vision and a true visionary in and of himself in Miguel de Icaza [btw... he recently posted a fantastic summary of the PDC, keynote and all... a MUST read!] as well a Nat Friedman, Edd Dumbill, etc... etc... etc..., the creations of people like Erik Meijer and Anders Hejlsberg , and the countless hours of dedicated effort put forth by the aforementioned and linked Mono-Project community to bring forth both these as well as their own creations in both language creation and extensions to the open source community in a completely cross-platform manner... I simply find it hard to see the point of making any attempt at trying to point fingers in Redmond's direction as the source of anything but fantastic and wonderful achievements that extend well beyond the shores of Lake Sammamish...
[Rant-Officially-Over]
From the above link:
At Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference 2005, Scott Swigart was able to sit down and chat with Microsoft's Amanda Silver, Erik Meijer, Paul Vick, Rob Copeland, Alan Griver, and Jay Roxe about some of the changes coming Visual Basic 9.0. Specifically, VB will have SQL keywords added to the language to support "Language Integrated Query" (LINQ). Here's what the folks working on this feature had to say:
Definitely a must read. As is Miguels coverage of the PDC...