The (Re) Emergence of Agile Languages and Domain-Oriented Programming

The JAOO conference in Aarhus, Denmark has become one of the most enjoyable and informative developer conferences in the land of OO. Originally a Java conference, it has expanded to cover a wide variety of topics from MS.NET and Java technology to best practices in software engineering. This year's conference followed on the heels of the Microsoft PDC earlier in the month. Both conferences featured tracks and sessions on scripting, dynamic languages and domain specific languages. There was also a Dynamic Languages Symposium Would any OO professional really consider using Basic when she has access to the full power of C#? Can MS really make it possible for disenfranchised Basic developers to have first class language access to XML, Databases and Objects with ease? Many at the PDC and JAOO were in shock as Erik Meijer (http://research.microsoft.com/~emeijer/) and the VB team showed off VB 9 features that combine clever type inference and structural sub-typing to simply and elegantly manipulate squares (relational tuples), circles (objects) and triangles (XML info sets) as simple polymorphic collections. Erik has also abandoned his solemn monadic oath of Haskell and quietly snuck some really interesting functional machinery under the hood of C#3.0 and VB 9 Erik is of course one of the key contributors to MS Zen and COmega (http://research.microsoft.com/COmega/) research efforts which are now bearing fruit in MS next language products under the name Language Integrated Query (LINQ – The LINQ team has really been thinking out of the box on this project and has made brave new efforts with very popular and widely used languages, which is always a great language design and implementation challenge.