PDC 2008: Day 3

October 30th, 2008

There was not too much to talk about for sessions I attened in day 3. I took a look at the replay of Anders Hejlsberg’s lecture regarding the future of C#, and I’d like to share some of my points:

• Hejlsberg mentioned that the trends of programming language will be declarative, dynamic, and concurrent. For the world of web applications, it is true for the rise of declarative and dynamic languages. It makes sense for C# as the main language of .Net, but not neccessary for all programming languages. However, programming languages have so many varieties of applications and web is only one of them. We still should teach procedural programming languages in school, and provide students opportunities of learning functional, declarative, and dynamic languages.
• Hardware industry hit bottleneck regarding to single core performance, and thus concurrent programming would be the answer for multi-core era. Current technologies had problems to deal with heap object concurrency automatically, which put languages featuring automatic memory management (e.g. Java and C#) in a disadvantageous position. As a result, one should be aware that C# might have higher development cost than C++ in the areana of concurrent programming.
• I guessed Microsoft finally realized versioning hell in a hard way themselves. As a result, many efforts were put to deal with side-by-side and COM Interop issues in CLR, C#, and even Windows 7 OS loader. These efforts should be very effective against reducing the working set consumed by managed process and easing the flow of development and installation.
• C# compiler will be rewritten in managed code and will be more transparent regarding to its internal handling. Besides of making dynamic programming possible, I saw some great potentials with it. Visual Studio team will provide many UML related functionality in 2010 version. It is possible to have a real modern 4GL combining the modeling tool in Visual Studio, C# compiler service, Oslo and Windows Workflow Foundation. I don’t think dynamic C# will replace Javascript due to compatibility issues among browsers.

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