Erik Meijer Selects VB as His "Language of Choice"

Erik Meijer recently posted a "Visual Basic and LINQ" guest entry to the Lambda the Ultimate programming-languages Weblog in which he stated that Visual Basic "has become his programming language of choice." This is no faint praise from a "language wonk" who's one of the major contributors to the LINQ Project and the Haskell99 functional programming language. Here's Erik's brief description of what VB 9.0 will offer to LINQ programmers that isn't likely to be available with C# 3.0:

Visual Basic adds some further enhancements to leverage the fact that it allows static typing where possible and dynamic typing where necessary in the form of relaxed delegates, improved nullable support, dynamic identifiers (makes writing meta-circular interpreters a breeze) and last but not least dynamic interfaces, or as I like to refer to them [as] strong duck typing (compare to simplified qualified types/type classes).

These enhancements enable VB 9.0 to support "XML Literals" and "Late-Bound XML." Watch for code examples in future OakLeaf blog items. Dare Obasanjo also weighs in on XLinq and Visual Basic 9 with a quote from the Microsoft XML Team's Mike Champion about Erik's contributions to X#, Xen, and COmega (Cω). On the software patent front, Erik is the primary inventor of two pre-grant publications—both dated August 18, 2005—of U.S. patent applications assigned to Microsoft Corp. that relate to Cω:

• 20050183071 Interaction with nested and non-nested streams
• 20050183058 Fast flattening of nested streams

Cω returns data rows from SQL-style queries as flattened streams, which “represent ordered homogeneous collections of zero or more values.” Streams are related to the .NET Framework 2.0's generic IEnumerable<T> interface. Each row of the stream is an anonymous struct (a tuple), which is defined by the Cω enhancements to C# 1.1. If a row is hierarchical (i.e., contains other rows), the runtime flattens the stream as its read from the data source, which can be a database or XML document.

--rj

Technorati: LINQ COmega

Update 9/19/2005: According to Microsoft's Matt Warren, Erik won Universal Studio’s Fear Factor—Live! award, which is no small achievement.

Update 9/28/2005: Erik presented "Why VB is my Favorite Language" at the JAOO 2005 Aarhus (Denmark) conferrence on September 27. Here's the abstract:

Some people have compared type systems with a dial; however in most languages that dial is either completely off (dynamically typed languages) or completely on (statically typed languages). Visual Basic is unique in that it allows the dial to cover the whole spectrum; it supports static typing where possible and allows dynamic typing where necessary. In this talk we will show some of the present and future support of mixed static and dynamic typing in Visual Basic.

--rj