Erik Meijer on LINQ as a 6GL Language Feature

Erik Meijer is one of the primary contributors to Microsoft Research's Cω (C-Omega) language and the forthcoming C# 3.0 and VB 9.0 versions for .NET 3.0 in "Orcas". He's a co-author of several papers about extensions to a general-purpose programming language (C#) that reduce the "impedance mismatch" of relational-to-object and XML-to-object mapping and traditional query languates, such as SQL, XSLT, and XQuery. Here are links to four Microsoft Research papers that will interest developers of data-intensive .NET applications:

• "Unifying Objects, Tables and Documents” by Erik Meijer, Wolfram Schulte and Gavin Bierman
• "Programming with Rectangles, Triangles, and Circles" by Erik Meijer, Wolfram Schulte and Gavin Bierman presented at the XML 2003 Conference
• "The Essence of Data Access in Cω" by Erik Meijer, Wolfram Schulte and Gavin Bierman (rejected by the ACM's Symposium on Priniciples of Programming Languages - POPL 2005)
• "XML Types for C#" by Erik Meijer and Wolfram Schulte (the original Bill Gates ThinkWeek presentation on what ultimately became Cω.)

You can also watch (and listen to) Erik's entertaining 1H:22M-long "Data Integration in Programming Languages" Producer for PowerPoint 2002 presentation and check out Erik's c.v. on his Microsoft Research home page. Erik will present three papers that relate to Cω, C# and VB topics at the September 2005 JAOO Conference in Aarhus, Denmark. JAOO claims to be "the Premier European Conference on Software Engineering, Methods and Best Practices." Here's Erik's latest bio from the conference's site:

Erik Meijer is an architect in the Microsoft SQL [S]erver division where he currently works together with the Microsoft Visual C# and the Microsoft Visual Basic language design teams on data integration in programming languages. Prior to joining Microsoft he was an associate professor at Utrecht University and adjunct professor at the Oregon Graduate Institute. Erik is one of the designers of the standard functional programming language Haskell98 and more recently the C-Omega language.

Following is the abstract of Erik's "6GL features languages to come" JAOO 2005 presentation. The JAOO 2005 folks' definition of 6th Generation Languages is: "6GLs seek to go beyond scripting to full blown application languages which are easier to use and more productive than Java/C# languages or generators."

Moving forward, the dominant costs for IT projects are people costs more than hardware costs. Meeting business needs revolves around improving developer productivity. This provides great opportunities for language designers and compiler writers to concentrate on providing more powerful high-level programming abstractions rather than than on low-level optimizations. This desire for more abstraction has lead to a plethora of new domain specific programming languages for manipulating data including XML with XSLT and XQuery, objects with OQL, and relational data with SQL. We argue that instead of creating such specialized languages, general purpose languages such as C# and Visual Basic should be extended with query capabilities. This allows programmers to query any form of data, using a broad notion of "collection".

We will discuss various advancements in Visual Basic towards simplifying the development of data intensive applications. In particular we will concentrate on ways to bridge the impedance mismatches between objects, relation data, and XML and the importance of dynamism in this trend. [Emphasis added.]

It's especially interesting that Erik will emphasize VB extensions in this presentation, because all his preceding papers have been devoted to the C# extensions added by Cω. However, VB certainly qualifies as a "full blown application [language] which [is] easier to use and more productive than Java/C# languages or generators." [Emphasis added.]

It surprises me that Anders Hejlsberg receives all—or at least the majority—of the credit for LINQ development. As Wesner Moise notes in his September 14, 2005 LINQ post,"Visual Basic seems to have introduced more extensive changes to the language than C#. Many of the COmega-inspired features seem to have migrated into Visual Basic instead of C#; one wonders whether this was due in no small part to Erik Meijer’s close relationship to the VB team." --rj

P.S.: Channel9 has a 12-minute video of Gavin Bierman, Erik's co-author on several papers, discussing data query languages in Cω. Gavin is a member of the Programming Principals and Tools Group of Microsoft Research in Cambridge, U.K. Gavin has prepared a MSDN Webcast about Cω that also describes other research projects going on at MSR Cambridge.

--rj

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