Anders Hejslberg, Erik Meijer, Herb Sutter and Brian Beckman recently sat down with the the Channel9 crew to have a roundtable discussion concerning software composability and functional languages (and the duality of each) as to how they relate to the future of .Net and the related languages that sit on top of the CLR. While I am familiar with the concept of functional languages, I don't come from a computer science background so I've never done any type of programming with say, Haskell or Scheme and quite honestly couldn't have even given a decent definition of what a functional language actually is until I watched their discussion.
What I find most interesting is that (when possible) I've taken a functional approach to writing code whenever possible without even knowing that's what I'm doing. Of course in the "real world" of writing software, taking a purely functional approach isn't feasible due to resource constraints (memory being the main one), but the ideas surrounding software composability as it relates to A) the existing CLR infrastructure and B) how functional language concepts are being introduced into languages running on top of the CLR are discussed in detail in what is probably the best video I've seen come out of the Channel9 camp. Of course it's hard not to listen to a group of 4 guys with a combined IQ of a bajillion, and as always Anders is simply brilliant to listen to. A must watch for any .Net developer.
Posted
Feb 03 2007, 03:45 AM
by
Jayson Knight