Microsoft's New Programming Language, "M"

Anthony_Cargile writes "Microsoft announced Friday their new 'M' language, designed especially for building textual domain-specific languages and software models with XAML. Microsoft will also announce Quadrant, for building and viewing models visually, and a repository for storing and combining models using a SQL Server database. While some say the language is simply their 'D' language renamed to a further letter down the alphabet, the language is criticized for lack of a promised cross-platform function because of its ties to MS SQL server, which only runs on Windows."

Comments

Not the current D

[PhrostyMcByte]

So apparently Microsoft tried to make their own "D" long ago and failed. It's not talking about the current D from Digital Mars. The article had me confused for a few minutes there.

Link to Register Article

[Anonymous Coward]

TFA was low on info and high on bias. The Register article is a little better. I couldn't quickly find any Microsoft release on the matter:

The Register

Actually, there already is a language called M

[kcokane]

The Mumps Language was re-designated as the M language a number of
years ago. While Mumps isn't as widely used as some others, perhaps
the people in Redmond should do a literature search before they
name things.

see:

http://math-cs.cns.uni.edu/~okane/mumps.html
http://www.cs.uni.edu/~okane/

Re:Not a problem

[zukinux]

It's almost the only thing the article mentions, you can't go more than three paragraphs before you get "MS sucks the tied D with MSSQL server". I would be interested in knowing what D is. Is there someone with a good article about M or D if that's what it is?

fanboy central here we come..

Hey,
It originated as a re-engineering of C++, but even though it is predominantly influenced by that language, it is not a variant of C++. D has redesigned some C++ features and has been influenced by concepts used in other programming languages, such as Java, C# and Eiffel. A stable version, 1.0, was released on January 2, 2007.
Here's a little explanation taken from wikepedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D_programming_language more info can be found on http://www.digitalmars.com/d Good luck!

M has been an ISO and ANSI-standard language

[dpbsmith]

...for decades. It has been an official alternate name for MUMPS, ANSI standard X11.1, since 1995, while MUMPS itself goes back to 1966. It has been available for virtually every important platform, including but certainly not limited to Windows, for decades. I believe it is still the programming language used by the Veterans Administration. It is the foundation of Intersystem's corporations Cache development platform, and a (much-modified) form of it underlies the product line of Medical Information Technology (Meditech).

Meditech's revenues are something in the range of $350 million, Intersystems' were about $140 million in 2003. That ain't Microsoft but that ain't hay, either.

Regardless of what the legal rights and wrongs might be--I'm not sure whether the ISO and ANSI standards are still current--it just arrogant and tacky and lame for Microsoft to have appropriated this well-established, decades-old language name, particularly when they're so pugnacious about defending their own rights to an ordinary English plural noun.

Re:Not a problem

[Tunfisch]

That's a different D.

Microsoft's D is "a new declarative programming language [...] that is expected to serve as a textual modeling language that will let business managers and non-technical stakeholders manipulate digital assets."

(http://www.campustechnology.com/articles/58675/)

Re:Not a problem

[klapaucjusz]

Ahem, no.

There's more than one programming language called D.

There's Digital Mars D, which is what you describe. And there's Microsoft D, which is almost, but not quite, completely unlike Digital Mars D.