Erik Meijer Promotes LINQ at Expo-C 2006

The peripetetic Erik Meijer is on the LINQ lecture circuit again—this time it's at Expo-C 2006 Software Architecture Conference in Karlskrona, Sweden. Here are links to Erik's two presentations: • May 17, 2006: Seminar: VB IsNot C# • May 19, 2006: Tutorial: Haskell for Mere Mortals + C# 3 Innovations Here's Erik's description of the VB IsNot C# seminar:

About a year ago I had a true "Road To Damascus" experience when I discovered that Visual Basic is unique amongst all programming languages in that it has static typing where possible, but allows dynamic typing where possible [necessary]. This makes Visual Basic better than dynamically typed-only scripting languages on the one hand, and also better than statically typed systems programming languages on the other hand. In fact, I am betting my career and reputation on the presumption that Visual Basic is the programming language that will democratize dynamic, data-intensive distributed programming in the Cloud, just like Visual Basic 1 democratized programming against Windows. In this talk I will explain why Visual Basic is not C# with a different syntax, what Visual Basic's late binding is all about, what we are doing right now to make Visual Basic 9 the best programming language for normal people that leverages the LINQ framework to query any form of data with features such as deep XML support and powerful query comprehensions, and how we envision to grow Visual Basic in the future as the language for the Cloud.

<WARNING> Do not attend this talk if you don't want to be converted into a Visual Basic believer yourself </WARNING>

There's more about the two presentations in Erik's Lambda the Ultimate post, "Functional Programming Has Reached The Masses; It's Called Visual Basic," which also contains a link to his recent "Confessions of a Used Programming Language Salesman: Getting the Masses Hooked on Haskell" Microsoft Research paper. Erik says the paper "starts with my attempt to use Haskell as the language to write three-tier distributed data intensive applications, then continues with my brief flirtation with the Internet scripting language Mondrian, the Cω language, the LINQ framework and C# 3.0 and Visual Basic 9, and ultimately comes to a happy end with my devotion to Visual Basic." Erik submitted the paper to the 11th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP 2006) scheduled for September 18-20, 2006 and close to home in Portland, Oregon. Karlskrona is a beautiful maritime city, especially in the summer. Having spent a substantial amount of time in southern Sweden, primarily Helsingborg and Trelleborg, I envy the Expo-C 2006 participants. A list of OakLeaf blog posts about Erik Meijer, which include links to his other recent LINQ presentatrions, is here. May 17, 2006 Update: Erik is the program chair for Lang .NET 2006 (The .NET Programming Languages And Compilers Symposium) to be held at the Microsoft Redmond campus on August 1 t0 3, immediately following OSCON (the O'Reilly Open Source Convention) on July 24 to 28 in Portland, OR. Of course LINQ is one of the "areas of interest." Technorati Tags: LINQ, DLinq, XLinq, C# 3.0, VB 9, Visual Basic 9, Orcas, Erik Meijer