Anders Hejlsberg Interviewed On C# 381
ghost. writes: "I'm sure it's been submitted already, but here's an O'Reilly interview with Anders Hejlsberg, Chief C# language architect for Microsoft (as well as the force behind Turbo Pascal and Delphi, in the past). While my interest in C# specifically is mild at best, I always seem to learn a lot when /. gets into a good discussion about programming and language design, and I'd enjoy reading everyone's insight based on what Hejlsberg had to say." It's a good read, too -- this interview brings to the fore some of the questions about openness that people raise about C#, and Hejlsberg has strong words about his new baby.
This guy gets around - (Score:5)
Good details on C# as described in The Register [theregister.co.uk]
Re:This guy gets around - (Score:3)
One thing I'd like to see is a GNU C# compiler. I assume this will be worked on by those over at egcs, once the standard becomes available?
Anders Hejlsberg != Microsoft ? (Score:3)
This guy definitely knows his stuff, and he had some very interesting things to say about his baby. I would almost get the impression that this guy is one of the lucky ones who doesn't represent the image of his company.
Of course, I could just be easily fooled. Did anyone else count how many times he mentioned "innovation"? :P
innovation (Score:2)
I think C# contains some pretty interesting innovations that make component development easier
It's not as though this hasn't happened before, but the way we've applied it to the language is pretty innovative.
We're not saying, "Now that there's only one language, there shall be no further innovations in this race."
We want to create a platform where there can be innovation.
Microsoft's favorite word?
wish
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Poor Andres (Score:3)
History lesson (Score:2)
Actually, Microsoft wrote PC-DOS too (well, sort of; they licensed QDOS [Quick and Dirty Operating System] from Seattle Computer but surely must have made a few changes before releasing it). PC-DOS 1.0 shipped with the original IBM PC, and MS-DOS 1.0 was identical except for the name (AFAIK) and shipped at the same time.
Bill conned IBM into this arrangement wherein IBM paid MS for R&D, MS gave IBM PC-DOS, but MS got to keep it for themselves too and release MS-DOS in competition with IBM.
Somebody more familiar with this stuff please correct my details.
--
Visual Basic Inherently Save (Score:4)
Osborn:
So you can't write unsafe code in VB?
Hejlsberg:
No, you cannot.
:)
-Waldo
-------------------
C# ECMA Standardization (Score:5)
with humpy love,
Re:Why? (Score:2)
Re:my favorite quote (Score:2)
Re:Hmmm... (Score:3)
Even Sun does this, deprecating / adding / altering... Java is an imperfect language in flux, and even Sun knows this as demonstrated by the rate of change. I have no problem with MS also recognizing this and deciding that they'd make slightly different design decisions, which apparently they do.
Why C# is better... (Score:5)
"In C#, enums are not just integers. They're actually strongly typed value types that derive from System.Enum in the
Wow! Now, next time I accidentally set the colour of my car to "Tuesday", the compiler will throw a hissy-fit at me! Hooray for C-#!
Donny
Open Source (Score:4)
...I think we've done a great job supporting COM on the .NET platform. But people in the industry have been reading too much into our use of the words COM and DLL. They conclude that the .NET platform is for Windows platforms only, and that's absolutely incorrect.
People have read too much into the comments because of Microsoft's past actions. It would be really nice to think that they are fully supporting open standards for SOAP and C#. SOAP has tremendous potential. Reading this gives me some hope... Until I think about every Microsoft product's perverted implementation of standard.
I feel like a guy who just met a pretty girl at the bar. I *know* I'm not going to get to take her home, but the **slightest chance** that it might happen has me buying drinks and listening to her every word all night.
Re:Screw++ (Score:2)
You should see my Perl. [shudder]
Only 9 Main Developers? (Score:4)
The language design team consisted of four people. The compiler team had another five developers.
Working with such a small team seems just too cool for Microsoft. To be fair, he says that the "the whole company" was involved with the framework. I think it's actually a good sign for C# that it was made with such a small team.
-Waldo
-------------------
Re:innovation (Score:2)
My, they have an interesting definition of "innovation", too. I wonder if it's innovative in the sense that compiler does it, or that it's XML tags. Otherwise, what the hell are perldoc and javadoc? (Maybe that depends on what your definition of is is...)
Re:Hmmm... (Score:2)
C++ is more flexible, granted, and some things in Delphi (pointer offsets, for example) are a nightmare in Pascal, but the development time is often far faster. There is no trying to remember whether you want a pointer to a pointer to an array of chars or just a pointer to an array of chars, or whatever...
Please don't start a huge debate about Delphi v C++, it's not worth it. And let's not mention the VB 'compiler' in the same sentence as fast (oops, just did it...).
Which company will get this? (Score:3)
While this might sound like it only has a tenuous relationship to the topic on hand, it is extremely important to the survival of C#. Why? Platform Independence. As much as they would like to claim so, C# is far from platform-independent. Microsoft likes it that way. So what will happen if it goes to the Windows division? Lock-in. While Java was destroyed by inconsistencies (one might say purposeful inconsistencies) in different implementations *cough*Microsoft's*cough*, C# will be destroyed by only being available for one platform. As Windoze slowly dies a painful death, it will take
If Microsoft is split up and
When I was reading this article, I actually was quite impressed with the language. But as far as I'm concerned, there are two options:
1: The
2: The
--
Microsoft Programmer Called As Defense Witness (Score:4)
"We will be presenting the judge and jury with a simple question," said attorney Rick Oxford. "Is it possible to write unsafe code in Visual Basic? Microsoft has already provided us with the answer: No."
Oxford was referring to a recent interview with Hejlsberg published on www.oreilly.com. In it, the interviewer asked whether it was possible to write unsafe code in Visual Basic; Hejlsberg replied, "No, you cannot."
US Attorney-General Janet Reno was flummoxed. "I'm flummoxed," she admitted. "That pretty much sinks our whole case right there. But you can be we'll make Gates pay for this." This comment sent Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) share prices plummeting to 0-7/8 per share.
Free Software Founation founder Richard M. Stallman was unavailable for comment. A spokeswoman said he was "busy buying Visual Basic For Dummies(tm)".
This is so bogus... (Score:5)
That's great, but his examples are stupid. Cases in point:
"one of our key design goals was to make the C# language component-oriented, to add to the language itself all of the concepts that you need when you write components. Concepts such as properties, methods, events, attributes, and documentation are all first-class language constructs."
Sure. That's new.
"And C# is the first language to incorporate XML comment tags that can be used by the compiler to generate readable documentation directly from source code."
So what? Ever heard of JavaDoc? POD? Having to code your comments in XML isn't a revolutionary leap (forward, anyhow).
"One of the key differences between C# and these other languages, particularly Java, is that we tried to stay much closer to C++ in our design."
-snip-
"Another important concept is what I call "one-stop-shopping software." When you write code in C#, you write everything in one place. There is no need for header files, IDL files (Interface Definition Language), GUIDs and complicated interfaces."
What?? First, C++ is the master of header files and interfaces. To write a language eliminating these is a good thing, but it's moving away from C++ and towards more modern languages like Java, not vice-versa. And even so, how can you say you're creating a highly component-ized language and then write everything in one place? OO-Pascal?
The most annoying thing about this interview is Hejlsberg's stance that people should choose C# because "We're starting with a clean sheet of paper" building a language from scratch. This has been done several times, but too often the first thing that happens to that clean sheet of paper is that it gets marked up with the motives of the creating body, in this case, anti-Java, anti-interoperability Microsoft.
Don't forget this is the same company that spearheaded the standardization of CSS, yet still fails to support the standard correctly in their browsers.
I'd just as soon start using Dylan [isr.com] exclusively.
Kevin Fox
Unbelievable... (Score:3)
'This notion that Java is 100% pure and gives you 100% portability just isn't true. There's a great interview with James Gosling on IBM's developer works site in which he directly addresses this issue. He said, yeah, the whole right-once-run-anywhere, 100%-pure-thing was a really goofy idea, and was more of a marketing thing. He says, in effect, "We didn't think we'd ever be able to deliver all that, and basically we haven't." Here's the inventor of the language saying that neither purity nor portability exists.'
The Gosling interview he refers to is here:
http://www-4.ibm.com/software/developer/feature
Check out the part he's referring to. The Microsoft guy is totally misrepresenting what Gosling says.
Re:Why Another One? (Score:2)
eh?! (Score:2)
buuuuuullshit. (except for the XML qualifier) this is exactly what perldoc does.
Enum is in the
he managed to fit some nice hype in there, aye? the
When you write code in C#, you write everything in one place. There is no need for header files, IDL files (Interface Definition Language), GUIDs and complicated interfaces.
so? aren't all of those things methods used to make code portable? if you're interpreting it all anyways, of course you don't need headers.
Developers are building software components these days. They're not building monolithic applications or monolithic class libraries.
what fucking planet is this guy from?
ok, so maybe it won't be a shitty language, but this interview is 100% market-driven spin-filled drivel. M$ is trying to replace 'object-oriented' with 'component-oriented' as the next language buzzword, and then be the only kid on the block with a buzzword compliant language.
blah! shut up and use perl.
--
blue
Disappointing but unsurprising... (Score:3)
Of course, for a more radically "innovative" approach, Microsoft already hired Simon Peyton-Jones, [microsoft.com] of some "fame" in the world of Functional Programming, and furthermore, he already had C--, [microsoft.com] Still Another "BCPL stepchild."
There are probably a whole pile of "cool things" that have been deployed internally that might actually be good things that will never see the light of day because, as Matt Welsh observes,
That can apply as well to languages as to OSes...
Microsoft support for open standards in C#? (Score:2)
Unusual little point in the interview I couldn't help but notice: Until now, MS has tried to milk the cash cow by locking the industry into proprietary standards that weren't usable without MS tools, MS platforms, etc. Examples would be COM+, OLE, ActiveX, VB, MFC, J++ extensions, etc.
Oddly, they seem to have taken a slightly different route this time: Yeah, they still want you to run Win2000, upgrade to Windows
I might point out that we're taking a true open standards approach with ECMA. When and if ECMA actually arrives at a standard for C# and a common language infrastructure, the result will be available under ECMA's copyright and licensing policies, which are truly open. Any customer, and any person, will be able to license the ECMA C# standard, subset it, superset it, and they won't have to pay royalties. They'll be able take it and go implement it on any platform or any device. We fully expect people to do that. That is something fundamentally different from our competitors who wandered around the standards bodies, looking for someone to rubber-stamp their proprietary languages.
The ECMA, if it ratifies the C# standard, will be in charge of at least trying to assure that MS can't mess with the specifications too much, such as to break platform/language interoperability. I'm as astonished as everybody else about Microsoft's sudden commitment to open and certified standards. Maybe they're aiming to have everybody use their language and platform - thereby creating a viable long-term solution that'd keep MS in business even if they were split up or if computing moved in a different direction, rather than attempting to make as much money as possible in the short term.
Makes you wonder, doesn't it?
Alex T-B
St Andrews
Re:Why C# is better... (Score:2)
well, yeah.. but what about someone else who's reading/updating your code?
I'd be like WTF.. this guy thinks tuesday's a color?
now i have to figure out what the heck he thinks tuesday is..
keeping things strongly typed is only a boon in my opinion.
Re:Which company will get this? (Score:3)
Am I reading this right? (Score:2)
So if I'm reading this right, the whole project goes in one big file? *twitch* Can you imagine the linux kernel in C#:
jferg@wallace$ wc -l linux.c#
3172394
Yeah. That's what I'm looking forward to.
documentation (Score:4)
So the compiler uses the tags to generate documentation? Cool.. I don't have to document anymore... I just put in a tag and let the compiler figure out what my code actually does.
This will be a great debugging tool!
wish
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Re:This guy gets around - (Score:2)
Hejlsberg: "caveat emptor, it's unsafe"
I know that I'm taking a quote out of context here, but really, I am not being flamebait.
I understand the reasoning in allowing people to use pointers, but can't say that I agree with it. There may be times and places that you need the power of pointers, but are they really necessary in the kind of programming situations that C#/Java are addressing?
I remember hearing that 50% of programmer errors in c/c++ were memory allocation problems. From experience, sounds about right to me.
Give people a hammer, and they will go around knocking screws into the wall with it.
Caveat emptor.
</disalaimer>
I must say I agree with one point made in the Register article you point to - Micros~1 should have looked at using python.
Re:innovation (Score:2)
We've tried not to take an "ivory tower" approach to engineering C# and the .Net framework. We can't afford to rewrite all of our software. The industry just can't afford it, especially now when we're moving on Internet time. You've got to leverage what you have, and so I think interoperability is just key
-Jon
Attitude (Score:2)
Regardless of where it came from, In spite of the fact that it was almost absolutely meant to be a "Java Killer", I'm still probably going to use it.
Why? It's like a new tool for my toolbox. Sure, I've already got 3 different screwdrivers I'm very fond of (Torx, Flathead, and Phillips), but what if a problem comes along where I a hex 'driver would be easiest? I'll be ready for it.
Even if it's not my programming language of choice, I'll still be competent enough to use it if necessary. All this zealotry and MS bashing is fun, but denying the usefulness of a language just because it came from MS is just narrow-minded, even if it's only a niche language for COBOL programmers to wrap their code in so it'll embed into an asp page.
I mean, someday YOU might need to wrap a chunk of COBOL into an ASP page.
Oh, and by the way,
Re:C# ECMA Standardization (Score:2)
Re: GUIDs adn IDLs (Score:3)
Let me see if I understand:
"You know all crap we've been forcing you to use to make your code work in our byzantine operating system for the past ten years? Well, turns out it wasn't actually as pleasant as we told you it would be, and we can do without it. Please don't lynch us for your RSI."
Re:Microsoft support for open standards in C#? (Score:2)
Funny, but... (Score:2)
-={(Astynax)}=-
Anders twisting James Gosling's word... (Score:4)
... There's a great interview with James Gosling on IBM's developer works site in which he directly addresses this issue. He said, yeah, the whole right-once-run-anywhere, 100%-pure-thing was a really goofy idea, and was more of a marketing thing. He says, in effect, "We didn't think we'd ever be able to deliver all that, and basically we haven't." Here's the inventor of the language saying that neither purity nor portability exists.
And this is what James said:
"The perfect goal of "write once, run anywhere, anything runs on anything" is just goofy. You're never going to run some piece of weather modeling software on a toaster [laughs]. And you wouldn't want to. So there are some scale and capability limits. But within that, you can do an awful lot to make sure that if somebody wants to read a file, it looks the same everywhere reading a file makes sense."
This is clearly a misquote. Gosling is saying that a toaster can't run a weather simulation package (yes, that is goofy). There are physical limits to what you *can* run (ie: you can't run an app with a display requirement of 4000x2000 on a handheld PC with a display of 100x100, or one requiring 128MB on a 64Kb watch). Nothing here is really surprising - Java's strength is trying to hide the minor differences so that you don't need to worry about these while moving between platforms (even some platforms that vary wildly in terms of physical specifications).
Re:Visual Basic Inherently Save (Score:3)
Standards (Score:2)
We focused hard on giving programmers all of the right solutions for interoperating with Internet standards, such as HTTP, HTML, XML (snip)
Ah yes, as usual Micro$oft are keen to promote internet standards. But who's standards? I wonder, do they mean w3 standards or M$ 'standards'?
Re:Hmmm... (Score:2)
That's a pretty narrow view, considering there are many, many good languages out there. For embedded systems, Forth is an excellent choice. For exploratory programming, Lisp is hard to beat. For writing compilers or slinging complex data structures, I'd choose ML or OCaml or maybe Haskell. For distributed systems, I'd use Erlang or Mozart. For certain problems, Prolog is an unbeatable tool.
C, C++, C#, Object Pascal, and Java are all working the same general territory. Sometimes you need a different approach.
What do they mean by "Cross platform"? (Score:2)
Marketing Buzzwords (Score:2)
OK, so javadoc isn't XML, but it does the exact same thing he's talking about here. Maybe the next version of javadoc can support XML as well. Or, maybe javadoc shouldn't be revised until XML2.0 comes out. Or maybe we should wait until the next big Marketing Buzzword comes into the now.
Remember, people, XML is useless without agreed upon standards of the XML structure. These are generally being decided by industries as a whole. This same sort of thing could've happened without XML (look at things like vCards, HTTP protocol, BCD, etc. -- all ways of communicating information irregardless of the platform-specific source).
Re:Only 9 Main Developers? (Score:3)
-Jon
This isn't about VBScript! (Score:5)
This will probably be moderated down as (obvious -1), but people are already responding with posts about VBScript kiddies etc...
I'm not impressed- I've seen all this before... (Score:3)
What does C# add to Smalltalk, and contribute to the the innovation of language design? Not much. It has "attributes," which are nothing more than embedded XML comments; COM integration (good if you're on Windows, but you could always use Dolphin Smalltalk [object-arts.com] for that; SOAP integration (Dandy, but it's available for almost every language around); compilation (you can do this with Smalltalk MT); and the ability to regress back into C-pointer mode to write "unsafe" code, to make sure the incompetent GC doesn't eat your objects (which were never rooted, probably by an incompetent programmer).
Many of these things are neat and useful, but reek of the sad state of language design nowadays, and available elsewhere with or without add-on packages.
What's almost as sad, is that a lot of programmers are in awe at the power of C# and Java, with their heads too buried in the sand of C's syntax to see the innovations that Smalltalk (cf. Squeak [squeak.org]) made 20 years ago.
MICROSOFT HAVE FINALLY GOT IT! (Score:4)
Who's helping COBOL programmers today? Who's taking them to the Web? Only on the .NET platform can you embed Fujitsu COBOL in an ASP page. I mean it's truly revolutionary.
THANK GOD! This truly is revolutionary! Yay Microsoft, you have finally made the web usable for the 1970s. I, and half a dozen COBOL programmers who couldn't really get INTO asp until now, thank you.
:D
sig:
Anders was NOT the Delphi god he's made out to be. (Score:3)
When Anders took over as the Borland Pascal Chief Architect (note: Delphi didn't exist yet). What he succeeded in doing was developing a product that nearly faded into the dev tool "Where is it now?" bin. It almost disappeared! VB was swallowing up BP programmers like crazy. Knock VB all you want (God knows I do), it was a *much* easier tool to develop Windows apps with because of that Visual paradigm that's so standard in tools today.
Then, one day, Anders gets this "brilliant idea" to take the BP language and put a visual interface on it! What a great idea! Why didn't anyone else think of that!?? (hmmm...)
The people that made Delphi a great tool then and continue to make it a great tool today are *still at Borland*. Anders came up with *one* idea - the Delphi *team* made that dream a reality.
I love Delphi, and I wish Anders well, but don't think that just because C# has his name on it that it will just automatically be great. That's the hype that Microsoft is hoping you'll buy into.
Level of honesty displayed (Score:4)
Re:Anders Hejlsberg != Microsoft ? (Score:5)
8
$
--
Lemme just pick this appart... (Score:4)
I was under the impression that one of Java's big strengths was that it didn't stick too closely to C++, and actually had a coherent, consistant design.
Why are there no enums in Java, for example?
Granted, having type-safe enums would be nice; but is this really a big enough flaw to design a language around?
one of our key design goals was to make the C# language component-oriented
Great... they're making it easier for us to write stuff to sell to those VB guys...
C# is the first language to incorporate XML comment tags
OOOER!!! XML tags. I'm glad Microsoft has decided that it's time to follow the industry standard hype. {MumbleMumbleJavaDocMumbleMumble}
Developers are building software components these days. They're not building monolithic applications or monolithic class libraries.
trans: Why bother writing decent software, when some schmuck who's never heard of a linked list can do it in less than half the time with VB (and nobody'll notice the difference)? Might as well accept that, and sell him the bits he uses to do it with.
We focused hard on giving programmers all of the right solutions for interoperating with Internet standards, such as HTTP, HTML, XML, and with existing Microsoft technologies
Well, what else do you need? HTTP, HTML, XML and M$? I should have figured that out a long time ago, and just taken UDP out of my TCP/IP stack altogether.
. Unsafe code allows you to write inline C code with pointers
If you need to write unsafe code to ensure that things don't get "accidentally garbage-collected" either the GC is worthless, or you're failing to fully utilize the paradigm.
people seem to think we're on drugs or something. I think it's a misunderstanding
Yes... the guys at Berkely were doing drugs when they wrote BSD. They guys at M$ are obviously too sober to put ideals over profit.
Only on the
The only revolution I want to involving COBOL very closely resembles the French revolution. Guilotines and all.
with C# we were able to start with a clean sheet of paper
Hrmm... earlier they were talking about how it stayed closer to C++ than Java did; now it's a "clean sheet of paper". I really wish they could make up their mind.
The unification of programming models, which the
So, they've learned the error of their ways, and have decided to bring the new unified APIs into the world with a new language?
one of the key differences between our IL design and Java byte code
And this is important how? Are they saying you can't run it interpreted? Anyways, I'd like to see a JIT compiler do better than the Hotspot model (interpretation + realtime profiling to find sections of code to compile to native code).
you can name your source files anything you want.
For some reason they seem to think this is important. I fail to see it. Skinable filenames?
I think developers will find the release of Visual Studio
It's a little late for them to start worrying about quality now; they're getting their asses Ma-Belled.
Go go Dylan (and NewtonScript!) (Score:2)
Actually, the best language I've ever programmed in is NewtonScript [gatech.edu] created by Walter Smith [best.com] who, ironically, later left Apple to work on Windows CE (now he works on Windows Update).
It's worth checking out (NewtonScript, that is. Not Windows Update).
Kevin Fox
The bottom line (Score:2)
If it is, then a compiler that emits C code compilable by gcc should be built. End of story. I think Microsoft would hate that.
Re:C# ECMA Standardization (Score:2)
Check out JPython [jpython.org]. You can subclass Java classes in Python, then subclass yourPython classes in Java.
The Innovation Factor (Score:2)
Ah, but you missed multiple occurances of innovat on a line. It may be that there are more than than. (I'm not saying that there are, but it's possible. Something like a line:
"We're innovating using other innovations...")
how about
lynx -dump some_URL | perl -e 'my $count=0; while(){ while(m/innovat/gi){ $count++; } } print $count,"\n"; '
(I'm sure there's a quicker way to do it with sed or something else, I just tend toward perl)
Re:Microsoft support for open standards in C#? (Score:2)
What makes you believe Microsoft will adhere to this standard any more than they've adhered to the others? He said himself that any customer will be able to take the Standard and "superset" it. Care to guess who'll be first in line?
Microsoft has never given anything more than lip-service to existing standards. A C# standard won't fair any better.
Re:Man, these comments reek anti-Microsoft (Score:2)
Comments on the interview (Score:2)
First of all, C# is not a Java clone. In the design of C#, we looked at a lot of languages. We looked at C++, we looked at Java, at Modula 2, C, and we looked at Smalltalk.
In other words, it's Java. Java has concepts taken from amny of those same languages - packages, everything inheriting from Object, and so on. They might have chosen slightly differently, but they seem to share the same base.
Why are there no enums in Java, for example? I mean, what's the rationale for cutting those?
That's because having such a feature as part of the language is not nessicary. You can get every benefit of enums he mentioned in the article just by making a static class like so:
public class EnumThing
{
private int color;
private EnumThing();
private EnumThing( int colorID ){ color = colorID; }
public EnumThing RED = new EnumThing(1);
public EnumThing BLUE = new EnumThing(2);
}
Then you just refer to it by EnumThing.RED, or whatever. You have the same level of type protection, and in addition you can specify the access level of the class to make the enum only accessible to that package (I have no idea what level of access control C# enums have).
And C# is the first language to incorporate XML comment tags that can be used by the compiler to generate readable documentation directly from source code.
It's not XML based, but Java has always has JavaDoc comments from the start - you've been able to generate documentation directly from code for some time now. This might be at a more granular level though (Javadoc comments are really for methods and attributes and classes, mostly).
You could easily add this to any language though - you'd just have to run documents through an xslt processor to strip out xml tags before compiling.
We've tried not to take an "ivory tower" approach to engineering C# and the
I don't have much to add, I just thought it was interesting to hear that
You've seen all the COM interoperability that we have built into the language and into the common runtime; you've seen how you can just import existing DLLs [Dynamically Linked Libraries] using the DllImport attribute; and you've seen how even if that doesn't get you there, we have the notion of unsafe code. Unsafe code allows you to write inline C code with pointers, to do unsafe casts, and to pin down memory so it won't accidentally be garbage-collected.
And how does security work in C#? That's a lot of access to a lot of things I'm not sure I want to trust at all!!
When you're writing unsafe code in C#, you have the ability to do things that aren't typesafe, like operate with pointers. The code, of course, gets marked unsafe, and will absolutely not execute in an untrusted environment. To get it to execute, you have to grant a trust, and if you don't, the code just won't run. In that respect, it's no different than other kinds of native code.
I really hate region oriented trust models. It also opens yourself up to bugs where you can get something to run even if the region is not trusted...
We want to create a platform where there can be innovation. Who's helping COBOL programmers today? Who's taking them to the Web? Only on the
Nothing like embedding COBOL in a web page for the ultimate in maintainability!!
I wondered how that really worked with other languages though, and came across this:
For example, we only have one kind of class in C#, and it is always garbage-collected. Managed C++, on the other hand, has two because it has to preserve the non-garbage collected style of programming.
So it seems for other langauges there are extra constructs that must be learned in order to work with
One of the interesting things that came out of our developer tracking study is that over 60 percent of all developers in the professional developer market use two or more languages to build their applications.
Yes, { Java,C++,Perl,PHP } and { HTML, WML }.
And what that tells us, especially when we ask which tools programmers use, is that there isn't going to be one object-oriented programming language which is the end all and be all language that everyone will use.
That might be true, but that's quite an extrapolation. I think it might be more true to say that the languages you use will migrate into business logic and presentation langauges, and perhaps more fragmented from there.
This next part is REALLY funny:
C# has more headroom and more power than VB does.
Osborn:
Meaning that you can accomplish more with fewer statements in C#?
Hejlsberg:
Well, meaning you have more power through the provision for unsafe code.
Yep, Lot's 'o power - just like a six year old with a tactical nuke is pretty powerful.
I think the approach we've taken with the IL is interesting in that we give you options to control when compilation -- or translation, if you will -- of the IL to native code occurs.
This is kind of interesting. Basically, IL is like the Java bytecode, but they give you a lot more options as to when the compilation to native code happens.
However, it does make you wonder why they just didn't work on using java bytecode as the IL, compile everything into that, and then work on ways to give you the same degree in compilation flexibility for java bytecode they do with IL.
For the compact framework, we have the EconoJIT, as we call it, which is a very simple JIT [Editor's Note:
Now I'm sure that
When you make the decision up-front to favor execution of native code over interpretation, you are making a decision that strongly influences design of the IL. It changes which instructions are included, what type information is included, and how it is conveyed. If you look at the two ILs, you'll notice that they're quite different.
I'm not sure if this is a stregth or a weakness. In once sense it's nice because you get somewhat optmizied IL for the type of platform you hope to hit. It another way it's quite annoying because you have to regenerate the IL for difefrent types of platforms - sort of moving binary incompatibility from the processor space to the task space. This might be bad for a library that could be used in a client side to generate something, but also up on a server in a web environment, and seems somewhat against the philospophy of components they are trying to put forth.
An interpreter emulates a CPU. We turn it upside down and we do one pass -- we always do one pass -- where we convert the instructions into machine code.
So, no HotSpot for C#!! It looks like they've decided dynamic optimization is a waste of time. Oh well, I guess they really didn't want that server market after all.
Since C# does not have that sort of marriage between physical and logical, you can name your source files anything you want. Each source file can contribute to multiple namespaces and can take multiple public classes.
All I can think of here is - ARRRRRRGH! I can just iamgine the maintainability of looking for code that could be ANYWHERE. It also seems sort of dangerous in that some totally independant library can "contribute" something to any namespace at all. It might be of use but it sounds like people could really make a mess with it.
Now, he is asked about Generic programming and what C# plans in relation to same:
Well, some of what we had hoped to include in the first release has been constrained because -- unlike what everyone believes about Microsoft -- we do not have unlimited resources. We had to make some hard decisions in terms of what is actually in this first release.
And generic programming features didn't make the cut. Now there's something you really want to tack onto a language later on!!
Our IL format is actually truly type neutral. And, by keeping it type neutral, we can add generics later and not get ourselves into trouble, at least not as much trouble. That's one of the reasons our IL looks different from Java byte code. We have type neutral IL.
Now that's an interesting aspect to IL. It will be interesting to see if they do come up wth some Generic programming ideas in the language, and how well they work out.
Overall it seems like an interesting language, and the end part of the interview mentioned some very nice capabilities. It will be interesting to see if they can stop some of the momentum of EJB application servers in the market.
They also talked about a number of areas in the EJB spec where vendors are allowed to create extensions. They claim that will lead to a lot of code that can only run within one app server, but from what I've seen people are pretty careful not to use vendor specific extensions of any sort unless absolutley nessicary - and usualy it's not.
Re:Why Another One? (Score:2)
- Is low-level enough to permit tweaking of memory allocation and can map classes onto hardware register sets (so Java is out)
- Has intrinsic vector types so I can write code for vector units which is optimized by the compiler
- Doesn't lost all its potential optimizations to pointer aliasing problems
This would be great for writing games! The world may have enough C-like languages, but that doesn't mean that specific sections of it don't need their own.Re:innovation (Score:3)
DOS - bought for $50k
Winders - ripped off from Apple who bought a tour to see it from Xerox who ripped it off from whats-his-nuts who worked at SRI who, in turn, stole it from Leonardo DaVinci (no, really, the design for the mouse is on the same page as the helicopter...)
Word - Oh, come on. It's a word processor
Excel - Nabbed from Visi-whats-it
PowerPoint - bought
Netscape - No, wait, I mean Mosaic... no, wait I mean Explorer
SQL - New MS innovation removes letters P and L from this acronym.
Age of Empires - No, really, it's Warcraft.
In fact, the only thing I can think of that MS really innovated on was PayWare with the Tiny Basic brouhaha... unless I'm missing something really big and obvious.
The real benefit of C# (Score:3)
That doesn't mean it's entirely worthless, though; in fact, the real benefit of C# might be that it guilts Sun into finally submitting Java to a real standards body. Sun likes to portray itself as an open company, and that image has largely flown up until now -- but when the contrast of Microsoft standardizing C# and Sun zealously guarding Java becomes too glaring, Sun's going to look decidedly less friendly. With any luck, Microsoft's pressure will push Sun into doing the right thing.
C#, the next M$ stop-gap? (Score:3)
I'll reserve absolute judgement until I play with it, but, here's a thought:
Whenever M$ gets backed into a corner by a competing technology that they either can not buy, or can't catch up to early, they release a vaporous competitor. This 'alternative' is intended to
1) bring in a cash infusion from the 'early adopters' of all things Microsoft (Usually clueless managers who mandate to unwilling IT staffs),
2) get FUD and fluff from magazine article writers from Ziff-Davis who are so deep in M$'s hip pocket they eat lint,
3) engineer public opinion that M$ has something better than the competition, 'just waiting in the wings'.
M$ most recently did this with WinCE, as a response to the PalmPilot. They had no real alternative to PalmOS, so they just threw something together and hoped it would stick enough to eat away at Palm. Now that they've had a few years to look at the problem, they release PocketPC - not an improvement IMHO; but I digress.
C# looks like round 2 of the Java war. Period. It's not INNOVATIVE in the least. It's a different way of doing things. It rolls together some previous ideas (comment markup, components, C syntax, M$-specific VM to run the bytecode) to see what will stick.
As with all things M$, it's probably a good idea to wait until Version 3.1, to see what it has to offer BESIDES an alternative to solid technology.
Re:Which company will get this? (Score:2)
Ooooo. So it'll be slightly faster than the spring melt in Greenland, eh? I have a real problem with languages that try to handle garbage collection for me. "Just let the object fall out of scope and the garbage collector will take care of it," they say; then when my application server is responding to hundreds of requests per minute and the free heap's rapidly diminishing stature signals the garbage collector...
Thanks, but I think I'll stick with an environment that lets me do the right thing and do it quickly.
Oh, and since when is stuffing all of your code into a single file a good idea? Hello? Sometimes 1 file per function makes a lot more sense. C# just sounds to me like a linguistic fashion show that was paid for by Microsoft.
Re:Anders Hejlsberg != Microsoft ? (Score:3)
The original design for NT was done right. Marketing stepped in and it went down the toilet. I feel sorry for Mr. Cutler for having to watch the marketroids mutate his product into the freakish monstrosity it is today.
Re:Unbelievable... (Score:3)
The perfect goal of "write once, run anywhere, anything runs on anything" is just goofy. You're never going to run some piece of weather modeling software on a toaster [laughs]. And you wouldn't want to. So there are some scale and capability limits. But within that, you can do an awful lot to make sure that if somebody wants to read a file, it looks the same everywhere reading a file makes sense.
That's a lot different, I'd say, than Gosling saying that "neither purity nor portability exists", and that it was "more of a marketing thing." My interpretation: All he's admitting is that you'll never have all the various platforms in the world (e.g., a toaster and a PC) be identical. An iMac isn't a Cray SV1. Therefore, perfect "write once, run anywhere, anything runs on anything" cannot exist, but one can get really close (i.e., as close as the hardware and the tasks and hand allow).
Re:I can't wait... (Score:3)
Re:Anders twisting James Gosling's word... (Score:5)
Re:Why Another One? (Score:4)
I think lots about this, really, truly:
1. Too many languages? No. Too many C's? maybe. People keep going back to C as the lingua franca so there has to be something to it. If you're going to come up with a new language, sticking to C roots may be the best way to ensure durability.
2. Languages will have to become more spcialized as time progresses and the complexity and scale of computing tasks grow. The future I see in my crystal ball (written in C, btw) are languages devoted to specific tasks such as cgi, game development etc. In a lot of ways this is a throw back to the early days of Fortran, Lisp and Cobol which were non-general languages. There weren't really the issues of scale and complexity back then though that we face now, so it was fairly easy for C to sweep them under the rug.
3. Future specialized languages will almost assuredly be themselves written in c. I'm not talking about yacc-hacks but honest-to-god interpreted or even compiled languages. What this means, though, is that in a future with fragmented languages used for specialized purposes, people looking to expand their power and control will look back to the source of those languages construction which leads to point 4.
4. Which is the same as point 1. People keep going back to the lingua franca.... so future specialized languages should stick closely to C while maintaining all the neat features that make them specialized in the first place...
Was that a bit scattered? Sorry, it's clearly organized in my head, but I haven't gotten around to scribbling out the boxes and arrows yet...
Not the right questions (Score:2)
- will Outlook (or WinMe) come with this "innovative" JIT compiler?
- will it be within the same "security" model as VBScript and WSH?
- what are the C# file extensions again?
Re:C# (Score:2)
proof is in the pudding (Score:2)
To fulfill those promises, Microsoft not only need to do better than some of the best dynamic language implementors in the world, but they need to do the hard work of producing implementations for their less favorite platforms, just like Sun did with Java. Given Microsoft's track record, I suspect that is less likely than the proverbial snowball in hell, and I wouldn't exactly plan projects around Microsoft's promises.
But if they deliver, good for them and good for all of us. Let's hold Hejlsberg to those promises a year from now.
Re:This is so bogus... (Score:2)
Pardon me? What? Microsoft doesn't support the CSS standard? Are you insane? Internet Explorer 5.5 is the most standard-compliant browser in the universe. And that's pure fact, not opinion. No other browser, not Opera (though it comes close), not Netscape Navigator, not even Mozilla, has the same level of standard-compliance that IE 5.5 does. In fact, Netscape Navigator 4.74 still isn't even anywhere near IE 4.0's level of standards support.
Saying that Microsoft is bad because they don't correctly support CSS is pure blatant ignorance. The point here is, Microsoft spearheaded the standardization of CSS, and now they're the ones who make the most compliant browser. That's a good thing.
--
A step backward in some cases? (Score:2)
I really wonder about a few 'features' of C#. First, I should preface this by saying I spent 6 years programming my Amiga in nothing but 68000 assembler. I then spent years programming in C (on the Amiga and when I first migrated to PC). When I heard that Java did away with pointers, I was less than impressed. Over the past year, though, I've programmed in nothing but Java and I actually appreciate this 'dumbing down'. Debugging other peoples' code is way faster because of it. By allowing 'unsafe' code, C# is going to unnecessarily complicate debugging and open up the application to longer development times and increased maintenance costs.
'They' seem to think that allowing unsafe code is no worse that allowing naitive calls. I beg to differ. If I'm going to access libraries that I've written in the past, those libraries were written and debugged with tools speicifically designed for that particular language (ie, C++ in my case). I've debugged and tested the code using source level debuggers and it's been in production in other environments so I feel secure in bringing the same library over to Java. Finally, like other aspects of object oriented programming, the libraries become a black box, hiding their 'complexity' from other developers on the project. When you allow for the ability to start dropping 'foreign' code right into your c# code, it is going to have a deleterious impact on OO development. Things don't remain as 'encapsulated' and it will likely demand a greater (language) knowledge from your development team. The last problem with 'unsafe' code is how you go about debugging it. When doing fancy pointer acrobatics using C/C++ (and even one graphics application I worked on using Delphi), I really needed the ability to drill down to the underlying assembly code. With Java, I've never found the need to so this. What level of debugging will be available for C#? How will C# cater to the debugging/testing needs of developers using "any" language?
Finally, I just want to say that I'm not happy about their support of compilation to native code. Having code be interpreted by default and leaving it to vendors to create native code compilers keeps your application MUCH more platform independant. Sure, Java was slow at first because all initial Virtual Machines interpreted byte code, but these days you wouldn't think about using a JVM without at least JIT (if not naitive compilation). The point is, your application always ships as 'generic' byte code and it's up to the user to have a JVM that offers JIT/naitive compilation.
Re:Which company will get this? (Score:3)
Sure if you are a good programmer and actually do garbage collection. As a physics major doing research using computer programs written by decent programmers who don't do their own garbage collection, I become very glad when I see a program written in Java because it has garbage collection. There is one program that the group that I am in uses, after a couple of hours it has leaked over a gig of memory. Trust me, it is no fun when several of the more powerful machines in the lab are down because there is a desparite rush for another large set of the events that this program simulates. Sure it is possible to create memory leaks in Java, but it isn't as easy to do on accedent.
To each his own. I do agree that for an object oriented language, the idea of having everything in one file is a bit screwy.
Re:Go go Dylan (and NewtonScript!) (Score:2)
Actually, it's probably a really good idea.... since the rumours of the wacom-style, small-binder-sized, it's-a-clipboard-with-a-g4 apple-branded-and-newton-based PDA are heating up... I must admit that this phrase from the Newton page always bothered me. Start quote:
Rather than two levels of abstraction, class and object, there is just one,
Objects without classes? um.... It's been a looong time since I was afraid of learning a language (although the prospect of objective C causes me a little bit of consternation....) but statements like that scare the willies out of me...
Re:innovation (Score:2)
Bob.
Nuff said.
You can't write unsafe code with Visual Basic (Score:2)
Maybe he meant "I can't write unsafe code with VB."
Or maybe someone spiked the punch again.
Slashdot goggles (Score:3)
The fact is, when it comes down to it, every high level language concept can be done in assembly or machine code. Big deal. The important part is how does the high-level language make the programmers life easier (and thus improve their productivity).
Stop your bitching, start thinking how C# might make you a better programmer. Tim Sweeney has written an article [gamespy.com] that you need to read. Although (from what I can tell) C# doesn't meet all his ideas of a "next generation" programming language, it is closer than C++ or Java. A quote for the whiners:
Assembly programmers didn't realize they needed processor-independence; it doesn't seem like a practical concept when your life's work is focused on micro-optimizing individual CPU instructions and register usage. C programmers didn't realize they needed objects because, after all, the world is made of functions and data structures! This seems silly nowadays, but at the time, C programmers had become so accustomed to the strengths and limitations of their language that they thought: since it's so difficult to express object-orientation in C, object-orientation must be a flawed concept. It wasn't then clear that C was simple a poor language for object orientation.
Similarly, most programmers don't see the fatal flaws in C++ and Java. People tend to look at the failings of C++ frameworks, component-based software, and binary platform independence, and deduce that those concepts are flawed. It isn't clear to most people that C++ and Java are simply poor languages for frameworks, and parametric polymorphism, and binary portability. Most programmers never switch languages. Either they don't want to, or the circumstances of their job don't allow them the luxury.
MS and Open Standards (Score:2)
Yes, this would be very cool... assuming MS's marketing and legal departments don't piss in the soup and turn C# into yet another MS proprietary weapon to snare customers into an MS-only world. I can imagine them tying key technology into C# and .NET that is somehow
covered by MS patents or such, making it near
impossible for a truly open implementation to
be created. They will of course wait until
C# has caught on, then break compatibility at
some point in the future. At least that is
my fear.
The designers of C# seem to have done some really interesting things with it, but they are not ultimately free to implement everything in the totally open way that they seem to desire, not unless management allows them to... and we all have seen the track record that MS management has in that respect (cough)Kerberos(cough).
Excuse me for being skeptical, but I've been burned by MS one too many times.
Thad
Re:Attitude (Score:2)
A hex driver is $3.99 and takes 20 minutes to buy (commute to hardware store included) and will solve problems that can only be solved with a hex driver
A programming language will take a couple of months to get comfortable with (depending on how much time you have to spend on doing other things at the same time...) will cost about $200 in books, lord-knows-how-much in tools and, in the end, there are no problems that only it alone can solve. There comes a point when you have to ask yourself if it's more efficient to get a "new screwdriver" or just get better at using a dime...
SARCASM: Wow! COBOL on the web! /SARCASM (Score:3)
Only on the .NET platform can you embed Fujitsu COBOL in an ASP page. I mean it's truly revolutionary.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! I almost fell out of my chair when I read that. ASP in COBOL???? Revolutionary??? Maybe Microsoft should also bring back some UNIVACS to run their .NET servers on :)
Never knock on Death's door:
Re:Anders twisting James Gosling's word... (Score:2)
WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?
Re:innovation (Score:2)
quicker way to do it with perl (Score:2)
lynx -dump http://windows.oreilly.com/news/hejlsberg_0800.ht
Innovative bogosity rating: 8
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
My fav inconsistency (Score:3)
we tried to stay much closer to C++ in our design. C# borrows most of its operators, keywords, and statements directly from C++. We have also kept a number of language features that Java dropped.
Then about a third of the way thru...
with C# we were able to start with a clean sheet of paper, so to speak. We did not have any backward compatibility requirements
Previously the interview had been at least interesting, but from here on he lost all credibility with me. I think he has been absorbed into the borg and has lost the power of independent thought.
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C# == Java + Goto Statements (Score:2)
C# suppots Goto: after 30 years of people trying to get rid of it this misrable programming construct, Microsoft include it in their 'clean sheet' language. How pathetic is that?
Anyone that tries to pretend that C# isn't a Java ripoff is just completely full of it, and doesn't know a thing about Java. The gall is unbelievable. Its the big lie.
Re:This is so bogus... (Score:3)
--
Re:What are enums? (Score:2)
One file (Score:2)
True, but I think the point was that physical
and logical structure were not tied together,
the way they are in Java. You *could* put
everything into one file, split one
big class into several files, put two classes
in one file, etc. In pratice, one class per
file is probablly the best way to go most of
the time, but I still like the fact that
you *can* separate the physical vs. logical
structure of your modules if you want to.
Re:What are enums? (Score:2)
enum is short for enumerated type, a type with a list of named possible values. For example:
enum DaysOfTheWeek { Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday };
If you define a variable of this enumerated type, you can't assign other numerical values to it (without forcing it via casts or other mechanisms.
Not a huge deal, but handy, and worthy of mention as a missing item.
Re:This is so bogus... (Score:5)
While more 'complete' than Netscape's CSS implementation, it's inconsistant, not only internally, but also across Mac and Windows platforms running the same version of IE. Regardless of other browsers, standards don't do the developer any good unless they are actually standard.
Supporting evidence can be found here [webreview.com] and here [webreview.com].
Kevin Fox
"unsafe" is a matter of implementation (Score:4)
I'm still disappointed that nobody seems to have come out with a universal sandbox that isn't tied to any system or language. Emulation of real-world systems is very complex (and therefore hard to optimize and debug), and if you put in mandatory features like garbage collection in the Java runtime, it's very hard to write compilers for certain languages.
BTW, I think calling it C# is a cheap stunt that will just add to name confusion. C is all about pointers, if pointers are frowned on as "unsafe", rather than the default way of doing things, it's not C.
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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Re:Why C# is better... (Score:2)
Funniest Quote from the interview (Score:2)
That's first time I've heard the adjective "compact" applied to the ultimate in bloatware. Even Emacs looks compact compared to Word.
Re:I can't wait... (Score:2)
And there's actually little or no Spyglass code left in IE today.
Simon
Re:My fav inconsistency (Score:3)
Taking the syntax of C++ is not inconsistent with starting with a clean sheet of paper. Next you'll be saying "Aha, the code is written in ENGLISH! Ha ha ha, and they said they were going to start with a clean slate!"
You can have theoretically classless objects. (Score:2)
However, I think in newtonscript's case, the classes are just hidden and called "types" (however, I could be wrong; I only skimmed the page).
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Re:Level of honesty displayed (Score:2)
Gosling never said anything about marketing, and he never said that purity and portability didn't exist (for some tasks). Two outright lies by Goodhew. What Gosling said was that some tasks are portable, and some aren't, and Java can handle both of them appropriately. Summarizing this as "Java is not portable, and never has been," is also a lie. Do you think Gosling would be happy with the summary Goodhew gives?
Re:SARCASM: Wow! COBOL on the web! /SARCASM (Score:3)
Re:Stroustrup's opinion? (Score:3)
Has anyone ever heard what C++ inventor Stroustrup thinks about the latest addition to the C family?!
Actually, this is in his FAQ [att.com]. Since it is a short answer, I will carbon copy it here:
What do you think of C#?
I have no comments on C# as a language. It will take a lot to pursuade me that the world needs yet another proprietary language (YAPL). It will be especially hard to persuade me that it needs a language that is geared for a specific proprietary operating system.
Clearly, I'm no great fan of proprietary languages, and quite a fan of open, formal standards.
--
Re:The more they evolve, the more they turn into L (Score:3)
In my experience with Allegro Common LISP, the compiler produces dog-slow code even on the highest "optimization" settings. I laugh at this paper that "shows" LISP to be 50% faster than C++. There are always articles saying Language X is faster than Language Y, no matter what X and Y are. They set out to prove something, and prove it, by ignoring evidence to the contrary and magnitfying supporting evidence. If you're convinced by this paper, and not just wowed by its conclusion (hey, you obviously love LISP) then maybe I should read it.
Just looking at CLOS, the amount of effort the compiler has to make just to dispatch a method invocation makes it seem extremely unlikely to me that a CLOS program is ever going to even approach an equivalent C++ program in speed terms.
Mind you, I only have experience with ACL (Allegro Common LISP) which performs extremely poorly. If you know of a faster compiler which is commercially available, please let me know!!! We have a mission-critical application written in CLOS which needs an order-of-magnitude speed improvement. I was considering recoding it in C++ ;)
You mention many features of LISP which are useful - and indeed they are. LISP is very good at wrapping things in other things. That's all its syntax does, so it should be ;) However, Smalltalk has an equally powerful object model, and it uses the more friendly infix notation (let's face it, prefix notation is unreadable to anyone but Ubergeeks).
As to your obfuscated C function, well wow, I've never seen one of those before ;) I can't be bothered decoding that function. It has no comments, no meaningful variable names, and no meaningful function name. If I had to guess I'd say it was doing an operation on a balanced tree.
But my point about syntax is that C's syntax helps you read the code, whereas LISP's syntax gives you no help at all. Sure you can write ugly C and LISP code, but I defy you to show me pretty LISP code! No-one's saying that every C program is readable - many quite famously are not - but we are trying very very hard to make our LISP code readable, and still failing.
LISP is certainly a more powerful language than C++, I'll concede that, but that sort of power scares me. Wait until you work on a bigass project and you'll see why.