Charlie Calvert's Community Blog

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Mi viejo conocido Charlie Calvert (otro ex-Borlander) ha publicado en su blog otra entrevista a Anders

Linq will be great, and especially welcome to those of us who have been using similar capabilities in Visual FoxPro since the early 1990s.

Great video Charlie. Anders' explanation about the loss of information that occurs when you "over specify" how to do something, as opposed to what you want to do, and the options that open up when you take a more declarative approach was awesome. He has a real gift for explaining things very simply and clearly. Thanks for bringing it to us.

what version of media player does this require as the video looks awful and if one trys to fast forward you lose the audio

How much effort can one man go to to avoid using the word "Monad" ?

Joking, joking ...  The elephant under the carpet is indeed concurrency. Understanding Monads might just be a requisite part of reclaiming the lounge room.  It would help greatly if people like Anders would at least attempt to explain where and how Monads fit in to Linq etc., instead of sweeping them under the carpet too.  We now have two elephants under the carpet ....  concurrency _and_ Monads.

I often hear that Reporting is a different beast. I think with LINQ that beast will go away.

someone have a text of this interview?

I am build a MDA system using C# and SQl 2005, this is the missing piece i need. When is the next CTP, or a roadmap on the release schedule.

this guy is REALLY bas at explaining things

Anders Hejlsberg on LINQ and Functional Programming

The unmaintainability of functional programming code (e.g., Lisp) is well known and is the primary reason why it should be avoided.  C# should have a few stable years of minimal changes to let it mature.  It would be more benefical to get a POSIX like standard for the generic parts of the .NET Framework (file IO, sockets, directory, date/time, timers, message passing, etc.) and then use that standard to build a thunk layer to replace Win32 with .NET framework only API calls.  This would greatly allow .NET code to be multi-platform (xbox 360, pda, desktop, cell phone, etc.).

microsoft decided to remove my last comment, saying that the guy isnt very good at explaining things

Great introduction for the LINQ (the new tool),I think in future as we move to higher level of abstractions it leads to requirement of more memory space. Specially in embedded world you do not have luxury of multicores and tons of memory. if you can add memory optimization feature in this tool this will be definitely helpful for embedded folks or you should provide APIs to use external memories like SD cards etc...

Anyway from embedded programming point of view this may not be the right tool.

It seems that C# is going to be second C++ when adding all stupid stuff into it and making it unmaintainable language. Then Microsoft and Hjelsberg will present C# Hell (as a reincarnation of DLL Hell) and will introduce to us new excellent platform overcomming those issues that are now implemented into C#3.0 (or 4.0) - I'm loosing myself in MS versioning. Pretty good future for MS revenue stream...

I agree; several of the changes being made are an attempt to provide powerful functionality which is missing from C#. This is being done currently without major changes at all to the MSIL.

Great Show! LINQ is going to make development a whole lot easier.

thanks, i appreciate c# team's efforts, c# is being teremendously developed we can not say no this won't make our knowledge mature but we have to keep up with the language powerfull features, i really fall in love with c# 2005, it's very RAD, very productive, we still want more support for mobility .... other platforms are waiting fot .net programmers too, linux is the most important one of these platforms

I just can't seem to get enough of LINQ (Language Integrated Query) - if this is new to you, then it's

Great Interview, LINQ is Great Stuff, but i  wonder if this is not too difficult for mainstream (noob) programmers. So will it really be come a hype? It really is a shift of paradigm, a way of thinking, how to solve the riddle. For every day problems people will stick to solution strategies learned long ago.

For me its a flashback, but then, my first programming language was lisp :) (On a MacIntosh!)

Community Convergence in a nutshell : The March CTP for Visual Studio, creating Art with LINQ, videos

Hi Charlie!

thanks for this interview.

What's that C# book on the shelf?

Cheers,

Luiz

It is a good interview.  Anders is a likable guy, but I think he stopped short of calling LINQ what it really is: Microsoft Embedded Lisp.  Isn't is amazing how excited everyone's becoming over concepts that were developed in 1958, and have been in constant use since (but, unfortunately, not owned by Microsoft).

Anybody else think this is a bad thing? I like having multiple development environments. The database has to do some very different things than the application layer, so it's best to keep those things specialized. I don't like this idea of munging everything into one language. We've already got enough problems with ASP programmers making SQL calls when they don't know what the hell they are doing... why make that situation worse and make it even easier to abuse the database?

just an uneducated opinion from an individual with no formal training in programming who has have never worked a single day as a programmer for a company (other than at my kitchen table).

Think about "Blade Runner" and the scene where Harrison Ford is using verbal commands to guide the futuristic  photo\imaging software program (pan left, zoom in 400 %, stop, pan right, etc).

The real future of computer language development is aimed at end user's who are not programming geeks.

For a Financial analyst/bean counter it might be as Anders suggests (with a little help from our geek computer friends): fetch these product annual revenue streams from the DB. Now apply these hypothetical direct costs for my "product objects" against them and give me as a 1 dim-array result set of contribution margin each yaer. Now for each result year, subtract these matching annual fixed overhead projections from this xml strore, then give me the MIRR from the resulting modified array of projected profit streams before income tax.

My point is,  to unleash the real power of programming language, you (programmers) place the ability to query and massage the data with

detective (Blade Runner) or bean counter, or chemist or physicist or actuary.

Please provide the Hejlsberg's LINQ approach

on msdn2.microsoft.com as an article, if not

more than the transcript of the video? And

more articles on C# integrated functional

programming.

Best wishes,

Petri V. Ticklén

deixia.com

Man, I could listen to Anders talk all day about programming.  I'm really excited for LINQ to come out.  I think it is the greatest advance in software development that we've seen in a while.

an opinion from one opinionated ...

I disagree with the evolution and constant development of new "Languages" and "techniques". They are infact making lives harder, constantly trying to learn new technologies, configurations, integrations, best practices and LANGUAGES is a constant struggle and challenge. Don't "They"  understand that after many years of a particular techniques, for example , Data Access (since is the subject at this point) creates a fully evolved understanding and technique, which many generations of programemrs understand, which in turn also has it's complimentary tools (Thet everyone knows about) which are developed for the ease and facilitiation of this well Oiled and understood technique.

Then "They" bring out a new "Way" LINQ for example that some wll know, some will now, only after some more headache whhich achieves the status quo ...

Although i do agree with developing the infrastructure, the platforms that will facilitiate stabilty of any application ... and minor evolutionary iterations on current practices that won't drasticall "Change the way we work./think?"

I think any "Technology" being develoepd should ask itself, "Is this really required ?"

The talk was good indeed.

you seemed quiet amused by all those hand movements that Anders was doing. lol

Hejlsberg videó a funkcionális programozásról Charlie Calvert blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/charlie/archive

I’ve been playing around a bit lately with computational genomics (I’m doing a project for my parallel

Well, Anders, it took you long enough. All the power has been there since the late 60s or early 70s pent up in isolated applications. I was wondering when you'd get to this and help us make everyday use of it, like you did with OO and Visual Programming. I did have the honor of shaking your hand and thanking you for that a few years back. Now it looks like you and your friends have done it again. Again, Thanks and Congratulations! :-)

I think it's a good idea of Microsoft. But, they need start to think about versioning, because everytime someone release a new version, for example, in the middle the last year Microsoft releases C#2.0, and now, there is a C# 3.0 (or C#4.0)...

It was very interesting to watch this video. Anders has a very nice way of explaining even the most difficult of concepts, by making it concise and simple to understand. I do agree that its about time we started to raise the level of abstration in programming languages. Functional programming and Lambda expressions will receive a grand welcome in that sense. We have all been programming at a very low-level( even though we are using Java or C# or whatever object-oriented langs) by excruciatingly specifying in code the "how" of things instead of the "what" that we want to achieve, therby producing very highly unmaintainable code. The semantics is drowned in the "how".

One thing, of course, needs to be realized, though. By including capabilities such as Lambda expressions and constructing expression trees for deferred execution we are also loosing a bit of the strong type checking. I guess there is always a tradeoff for such power that functional programming and lambda expressions bring to any language, like for example C#.

cheers,

jay

Is LINQ project still alive? Is it supported on the .net 3.0   and 3.5?

Thank for your help

Reiner

Two words: expression templates.

Main point: LINQ gives you cake you can have and eat.

Some themes: (my paraphrasing, see the video for yourself to form your own impression)

LINQ deals with the problem of separate and programming areas: one for data (includes SQL and T-SQL; XML and XSLT/XPath; and other arbitrary data, like the properties of objects, etc.) and the other for program execution that you see in imperative languages (C#, VB, script, etc.)

LINQ helps to merge the two elevating query operations in C#, for example, to a rock-solid, built-in feature, like the way 'if' statements are now.You write queries into your code as "Lambda expressions". (Sounds sort of like how XPath statements look abbreviated syntax.)

Lambda expressions then work in your code as delegates: you can reference them; but what's very interesting is that the IDE/compiler can use them too. One example, because each Lambda expression can be interpreted immediately, the compiler will tell you right away if table names are not spelled correctly in your code. Another example, all your data expressions can be displayed on a tree for easier inspection, etc. I might be missing some of the finer points but what do you want from a comment on a Web page, for cryin' out loud. Ahem.

Functional programming aspects of LINQ take full advantage of concurrent execution. In practice, this means that all other things equal, LINQ code runs faster on a multiprocessor machine than non-LINQ code.

My question for Anders. When it became apparent your prototype was an instance and not a class, was this type of major finding part of you envisioned? More to the point, was it part of your original development plan to signifcantly broaden the scope of your project?  

Great overview and a superb way of making the concepts understandable very quickly. I took a whole year of functional programming at university (ML) and all the lambda stuff and I didn't get half as much out of it as in this half hour. Thanks!

BTW great Video. I have played with Blinq after teched last year. What is the upgrade path for Blinq apps that use dlink with the impending release of Linq? Are there new paradigm changes for the type checking? Is this technology packaged up with Linq or does this have to be generated by lambda expressions for self checking programs using crazy syntax? Does this make the Xlinq language deprecated?

Hi This is Narayanan from chennai, i went through the document of XLinq, but how do i try that do i need to download. Currently i'm having Visual studio 2005, please guide me in this, because i wanted to learn this technology.

Let me see if I've got this correct. We had a handful of simple commands. Through in code comments they became modules. These became functions.

Now, sometime in the 80's, to add a gui to our apps, we're given a collection of thousands of functions.

This became too much, so we abstracted it down to hundreds of functions. Now we've got a gui.

In the data realm, we aggregrated data into a single form for our purpose. We then were told to aggregrate data in any form. So we created a bunch of new functions, err..modules, err...objects.

Now a new layer of abstraction to eliminate some of the functions we've just finished writing.

And perhaps a neat feature would be to simplify the syntax while we're at it.

At some point, I'd like to finish my app. HAve it run for awhile and not have to scrap it for the sake of a new 'paradigm'. The app should at least be able to survive long enough to recoup it's development cost. I'd like to add new features to my app that my customers want not what IT dictates.

And lastly, I'm tired of being told that my old shoes are brand new.

Sorry, about the rant. This discussion is only the last straw. not the entire camel

I am always amazed by how Anders explains new concept, deep but somehow easy to digest.

A very good presentation indeed by Anders. I've been in systems development for 30 yrs and seen similar steps (apart from minor differences in terminology and detail) in the development of quite a few programming languages: major upgrades brought in a more "declarative" style of programming, adding high-level functions (often, these are parameterized). Composability and deferred execution offers the SQL/OLAP/MDX-like style of expression that has been unfortunately considered a second-order issue by the object community before.

This in turn makes it possible to write optimizing compilers as the app code tells the compiler the big picture rather than just low-level imperative-style detail.

To the app. developer, this is more about level of abstraction and about useful expressive power than about programming paradigms.

Many thanx for a comprehensible presentation of a complex world!

Hey hey hey! Long time no talk Charlie :) I can see you're doing great! The video is AWESOME and helps getting to the point right away. I was trying to understand the big picture here and this provided me with quick and high level answers to essentially all the "doh?"(s) I was having. Thanks again!

I am working with linq in SQL 2005, I need know if LINQ work with ORACLE???

Thanks..

Wilmer Garzón

Bogotá, Colombia

wgarzon@gmail.com

Thanks very mach.

It's so helpfull to me.

~~Merry Christmas, Best wishes to you~~

何谓 LINQ程序语言随着时间演进，一再沉淀经验与抽象后，以简练直观的语法解决具有共通特征的各式问题。Visual Studio 2008(程序代码名称为 Orcas)、C# 3.0 与 VB.NET 9.0 后将支持新的语法 Language Integrated Query(LINQ)，想一体解决多样的资料存取。它是由 Anders Hejlsberg 所主导。Anders 曾打造了 Turbo Pascal、Delphi、Visual J 、C# 等叫好叫座的产品，单凭这位杀手应用创造者的眼光，LINQ..

In order to solve a complex problem, you need to stop thinking at the level that created the problem in the first place. You need to think at a level much higher.

Acronyms, syntax, paradigms, frameworks... These are all illusions. The problem is, all too many of you spend your life in the matrix of these illusions. Try this paradigm: do more, do more fast, do more amazing, do more now, analyze.

Let's allow the eccentrically brilliant low-level thinkers do what they do best, so we can increase our capacity, so 20% of our effort amounts to 80% of productivity. Or better yet, so that 1/1000 of our effort amounts to 99.99% of our productivity.

Think of what would become of us if we could produce solutions to problems exponentially faster, with less manpower, without having to spend years learning the low-level implementations that get us nowhere in the long-run.

Compound the efforts of a virtual community. The best inventions are merely improvements to those already exist.

To the complainers -what did you do today?

Francesco Franconi - are you in Software or Marketing? I have never read anything so full of glib, cliche-ridden tripe in a while.

Is this available in an open format so we can actually watch the video?

The complete programming community is just now getting sold on Object Oriented programming.  How is a divergence to Functional programming going to be accepted.  This is obviously the long term goal.  Does it really work hand in hand with OO programming?  I don't think that it really does.  Do we all really want to be programming in a LISP like language 5 years from now.

I've been programming for 30 years, starting with COBOL, RPG, and IBM 360 Assembly language. I remember when it was hard to get programmers to adopt structured programming techniques. Since the release of the IBM PC and MS DOS and after Windows 3.0 began to rule I've seen many bets against Microsoft that failed. I remember smart programmers who questioned whether LANS would be useful - when they already were. I remember when many questioned OO and whether it really meant anything. Functional programming is probably the future and it's not that difficult to learn Linq, at least, so you're really taking a chance if you let it pass you by. And to the guy who thinks Anders is bad at explaining - you better find another line of work or learn English better.

Gotta comment one more time - to all the whiners about changing paradigms and versions and yada, yada, yada. Shut up or find a different line of work.

Finding info is a breeze now compared to even ten years ago. And for those who see these kind of changes as analogous to the bloat of C++, you aren't paying attention. Perversely, I bet some of you bitched about not doing your own garbage collection anymore the same way assembly programmers didn't want to give up control. They at least had the excuse of slow processors.

Fine with me, I wouldn't mind programming until I'm 90, it's just now starting to get fun.

Wow, I never realized how programmers who sound so smart can be so dumb. Glad I didn't listen to the ones who thought Object Oriented Programming was a fad.

.net merges the world of memory “non-management” and objects and pretty much solves a lot of rapid application development issues.   Even data access is basically simple when done right in .net.

Instead of creating applications, whole groups of highly paid developers spend time hiding proper language use with what can be described as a “.net Bean”.

You then spend your time debugging the tool instead of getting any work done, or learning data access the way .net intended it.  Which, by the way is pretty easy, if you ask me.

Why programming managers get caught up in these things that eventually ruin the language with overhead evades me.  

You have programming hiring managers asking questions about linq instead of whether you can get a running application in the market.

Dave Carlson