Lang.net wrap-up

The last time Lang.net was held (around 18 months ago), I made up my mind to start the process of coming to Microsoft. OK, it was the bright lights and mind conditioning in the back room that made me come but I digress ...

This time around, it was fun seeing the show from the other side of the fence. That meant, of course, that I had to sit in the cheap seats so that the 'paying' customers could have the good seats up front. The show didn't disappoint.

I'm not going to go into a blow-by-blow account of everything that happened at the show. Ted Neward does an excellent job of that in these posts: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3.

As usual, the show had a great mix of folks from inside and outside of the company, as well as folks from the .NET and JAVA communities. Even PHP was represented. The following is a random summary of things that I thought were particularly interesting / noteworthy.

Jason Zander and Don Box were the book-ends of the conference. Jason led off with a look back at the early history of the CLR, and actually dug up some old emails from that era. Don capped off the talk with a look back at how the history of [meta]data from /SUBSYSTEM:CONSOLE to XAML and a look forward to the promise of declarative programming (no secrets were harmed in the making of his talk though).

Anders Hejlsberg reviewed where C# 3.0 is today, and foreshadows the eventual convergence of languages. We see some hints of that today in F#, which combines functional, imperative and OO paradigms. It was a great look at how the set of features in C# 3.0 when combined create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Jim Hugunin did a reprise of his 'what does daddy do at work talk?'. Of course, if you've seen Jim do a talk in the last year or so you couldn't miss the robot that usually accompanies him:

The take home message in his talk is that 'sharing is good', which explains a lot of the motivation behind the DLR.

Martin Maly (the LOLCODE king) did an excellent talk on building a language on the DLR. He showed how to add nodes to the ToyScript AST, and how to use DLR features to make that code run faster. Martin is the DLR AST dev, and is blogging up a storm on how to use his baby to implement your language.

Erik Meijer did his best mad scientist imitation with a look at Volta. Volta is his project that lets you build web apps using nothing more than your favorite CLR language. Volta's big feature is 'tier splitting', where it handles the details of partitioning your app into the parts that run on the client and those that run on the server. The client parts can run on a client-side CLR (if one is installed) or it can run on JavaScript (via a CIL -> JavaScript transform). It's a cool idea, and worth taking time to look into.

Peli de Halleux talked about Pex - a very cool dynamic analysis framework that generates test cases for your app. You should carve out a chunk of time to watch their most excellent 5 minute screencast on Pex.

Jeffrey Sax gave a talk that could have been titled "N reasons why the CLR sucks for numerical computing". But Jeffrey is too polite for that, but instead presented a very critical look at the parts of the CLR that warrant improvement. He got most of the analysis correct, and a bunch of folks including Vance Morrison (the CLR perf architect) had a chance to follow up with him directly after his talk. That's a great example of the value of gatherings like this to get folks together in a room to have an open and frank conversation.

Of course, Miguel de Icaza didn't disappoint in his talk. Split into several 'themes', he talked about Moonlight, how it happened, where it is today, and where it can go. Miguel's talks are interesting because they are about people as well as technology. He tells the behind-the-scenes story which engages with a primitive part of our brains. The story about JB Evain's Rodrigo de Oliveira's 20 hour hack to create a statically typed JavaScript-esque language from Boo, and how it is used to make video games in Unity, was awesome.

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For those of you who are wondering about Ruby and Lang.net, there will be here's a separate post about all that fun stuff :)

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I'm a huge fan of Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project. If you're a parent, go visit her wonderful multimedia story: The Years Are Short. You won't be disappointed.

Comments

[Jb Evain]

Hey John.

Ah, I wish I was there... Hopefully next time!

Let's give back to Ceasar what is Cesar, it's Rodrigo who created the JavaScriptish language for Unity, not me. But we're still working on extracting that, would be nice to have that ready for the 2009 edition of lang.net.

[Bertrand Le Roy]

Oh man, I can't believe I missed that. Last time was awesome. We're not doing a very good job of promoting that event internally...

[John Lam]

@JB: Yikes- will fix that. But I blame Miguel - he even used your full name when he said that :)

@Bertrand: Well, it is as much my fault as anyone else's. During my blogging 'pause' that happened last year I forgot to promote the conference here ...

[Nigel Smith]

Liked the talk on Managed JScript.

I was surprised at the implementation detail being disclosed (given how closed Microsoft have been about Javascript on the DLR). Does this mean we can see Managed JScript on codeplex soon?

Cheers.

[John Lam]

@Nigel: I don't know what the plan is for Managed JScript. I have no idea whether we'll keep it closed source as it is today vs. open sourcing it down the road sometime.

[Mahesh Prakriya]

Well, lang.net wasn't really advertised as it didnt need it this time around (internally/externally).

It "sold out" pretty fast and we were limited to 80 folks given our facilities here.

My goal is to get this to be larger next time around (~100 or so) and will post a bit earlier.