Erik Meijer to Keynote QCon London Conference

Erik Meijer will deliver the "Democratizing the Cloud" keynote to the QCon Conference to be held March 12 - 16, 2007 in London. Erik, whom the conference management calls "the creator of LINQ," describes democratizing as:

[T]rying to stretch the .NET framework to cover the Cloud such that it will become possible to incrementally and seamlessly design, develop, and debug complex distributed applications using your favorite existing and unmodified .NET compiler and deploy these applications anywhere.

The Democratizing Backstory

You can preview Erik's keynote in a eponymous January 13, 2007 Channel9 video, and read a seminal January 24, 2006 post in Lambda the Ultimate: "Beyond LINQ: A Manifesto For Distributed Data-Intensive Programming." This post marks Erik's first known public use of the term democratizing in the context of programming distributed systems.

Erik runs Microsoft's Tesla incubation team that's tasked with democratizing the Cloud, "like Visual Basic democratized programming Windows many years ago." Erik chose VB as the project's language because "it's uniquely positioned" between strict, static-typed languages like C# and Java and loose lenient, dynamic-typed languages, such as Ruby and Python. The goal is to enable static typing when necessary and dynamic typing when appropriate.

One approach the Tesla team is investigating to give democratized VB applications greater reach is compiling CLR IL to JavaScript. An alternative is to compile IL to Perl 6 and then compile Perl to JavaScript with an existing implementation. The Perl 6 group also is working on compiling Perl 6 to the CLR IL.

Note: Another Tesla team incubation project is LINQ to XSD.

Update 3/16/2007: Read "LINQ 2.0" in Early Returns from QCon 2007, London, which provides links to reviews of Erik's keynote.

Update 4/24/2007: Read Mary Jo Foley's ‘Volta’: Microsoft’s dev platform in the Cloud? article about the "Live development platform" that Soma Somasegar plans to divulge at MIX 07. Read desicriptions of the four sessions that contain LINQ content in LINQ-Related Sessions at MIX 07.

Presentation: "Introduction to Microsoft Language Integrated Query (LINQ)"

Erik also will present a one-hour sales pitch for technical presentation about LINQ and Visual Studio vNext as part of the .NET Enterprise Development Track hosted by Ted Neward.

Note: Thanks to Mary Jo Foley for posting "Why the Sharp languages still matter" on her ZDNet All about Microsoft blog. The post includes links to her "Sharp Words with Microsoft's Erik Meijer" interview and "Look Sharp: How C#, F# and other experimental programming languages are driving next-generation development" article for Redmond Developer News.

Update 2/24/2007: Minor corrections.

Technorati tags: Erik Meijer, Democratizing the Cloud, LINQ, Tesla, QCon, VB 9.0