.NET at 9.400 ft above sea level

It seems like the .NET platform happened to be a nice innovation test bed. Mary Jo Foley talks about the “Sharps”, the growing cloud of experimental programming languages (A#, Cocoa#, F#, Gtk#, J#, Sing#, Spec#, X#) that range from data oriented (X# or C Omega) to functional programming (F#, my favorite) to operating system construction (Sing#). What all this has to do with the title? Some thirty years ago, the American army figured that its contractors were using too many programming languages (well over 400) so they had a real Tower of Babel. What to do? Well, in pure military fashion they formed a committee to choose the best programming language, the committee decided that no existing programming language deserved the label so that, in order to eliminate the excess of programming languages in use, they decided to create another one: Ada. Ada saw the light in 1980 and, for a while, the Department of Defense tried to force its contractors to use nothing but Ada, in the end they had to abandon the rule, even though the initiative did give fruit: from over 400 languages used they went down to less than 40, nice try indeed. What does all this have to do with .NET? Well, one of the "sharps", A#, is an implementation of Ada in .NET and, to be honest, this is not even news, A# has been alive since 2004 and its latest version (June 2006) works only on .NET 2.0. So if you feel like programming in .NET military style, you can use A# (as for me, I have my hands full with C# and F#).

The paradigm behind functional programming says that everything can be solved creating and combining functions. Mathematical functions that is, like in "a transformation that takes values from a domain and map them to a codomain". For example, the domain of the length function is the set of all possible character strings and its codomain are the positive integers, the sin function has as domain all the angles and as codomain the reals between -1 and 1. A couple of function definitions in F#:

Since, by pure coincidence, I learnt some LISP and functional programming. languages like Haskell have intrigued me. Now, this kind of academic interests happen to have practical ramifications that may be of interest to many of you. For example, C# 3.0 will have features like lambda functions and type inference which are abilities brought from functional languages, furthermore, Orcas LINQ, the new proposal for integrating generic queries into C# and VB.NET semantics, is a direct application of functional concepts. This video is a fascinating conversation on the relevance of such concepts for solving actual problems like using the potential of multi-core CPUs or handling concurrency in transparent ways, people like Anders Hejlesberg feature on the video, so it's worth downloading. After watching the video I think many of you will want to learn some more about functional languages and, from the many available options, may be the closest one is F#, which was created at Microsoft Research and runs inside Visual Studio, I suggest to start with this very gentle video which is an eye opener, later on you can watch Don Syme (the creator of F#) talking about the ideas behind the language here and then he shows us the language here (although for starters I prefer the Flying Frog Video). Happy lambda programming!