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Another .NET Language

Posted by Hemos on from the expanding-their-weaponery dept.

Wankers Anonymous writes "In an interview with David Simmons, CTO of SmallScript Corp., Learn about a new .NET language about to debut, the ins and outs of its creation, as well as some insider history behind the genesis of the .NET platform. "

2 of 34 comments (clear)

  1. Re:well done... by SteveX · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Notice in the article that Microsoft invited representatives from a LOT of different languages to the table when designing the CLR, to ensure that while they might not necessarily support them all ideally in v1, they wanted to make sure they weren't doing anything that would preclude them from supporting them in the future.

    The next version of the CLR adds support for generics and some other stuff.. language support will only get better. (I don't see Sun working on making the JVM better suited to languages other than Java...)

    - Steve

  2. Re:well done... by voodoo1man · · Score: 2, Interesting
    10 to 15 different languages? They can't even get an exact number, much less say what they are (and how closely they're related).

    At the very least, they didn't even bother looking at Common Lisp - Franz took a look at the CLR several years ago and decided that it wasn't even worth the trouble. It is impractical to get CLOS (the Common Lisp Object System - multiple dispatch, multiple inheritance, generic functions, and completely dynamic (you can re-define a class at runtime, and all the instances, and subclasses, etc. will be converted according to either a default or user specified method the next time they are accessed)) implemented with any sort of efficiency. Closures and dynamically generated lambdas (anonymous functions that capture a lexical environment and plain vanilla anonymous functions, created at runtime, respectively) seem to present a similar sort of problem from what I know of the CLR (I understand that they'd have to be represented as objects, please correct me if I'm wrong).

    I've heard other similar objections to the inadequacy of the CLR when it comes to dynamics languages, and overall I'm not terribly impressed with what Microsoft is doing or how it is going about it (the seemingly primary reason why .Net has/will have Scheme implementations from both Northwestern and PLT is because of rather large grants).

    --

    In the great CONS chain of life, you can either be the CAR or be in the CDR.