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Microsoft Develops New Programming Language For Quantum Computers (cio-today.com)
Microsoft's newest programming language will run on yet-to-be developed quantum computers. An anonymous reader quotes CIO Today:
Microsoft said its new quantum computing language, which has yet to be named, is "deeply integrated" into its Visual Basic development environment and does many of the things other standard programming languages do. However, it is specifically designed to allow programmers to create apps that will eventually run on true quantum computers... Like other companies, such as Google and IBM, Microsoft has been working for years to advance quantum computing research to the point where the technology becomes feasible rather than theoretical... Joining Satya Nadella on stage, Fields Medal-winning mathematician Michael Freedman added, "Microsoft's qubit will be based on a new form of matter called topological matter that also has this property that as the information stored in the matter is stored globally, you can't find the information in any particular place..." The programming language is expected to be available as a free preview by the end of the year and "also includes libraries and tutorials so developers can familiarize themselves with quantum computing," Microsoft said.
So successful mathematicians' fate is to get to gobble corporate cock by shilling for the next release of New Big Thing (TM) (R)?
Today is a day for mathematicians to hang their heads in shame.
So does this mean Microsoft quantum software can be in a superposition state of both running and crashed?
I wonder how fast a quantum computer executes and infinite loop?
Microsoft Visual Basic was discontinued in 1998
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic
Visual Basic has been based on .NET since 7.0....
Everyone knows that the software is the hardest part of making a quantum computer. LOL!
if..then..maybe..maybe not..probably..surely..
Apparently there's nothing that Microsoft won't at least attempt to slow down
They simply misspelled "Visual Studio". https://cloudblogs.microsoft.c...
The real test will be a do while.
Thirty four characters live here.
VB was already pretty close to quantum computing - you could get different results every time you ran it pretty much following a statistical pattern like the uncertainty principle.
... Q# ?
before microsoft even gets their programming language developed to a usable level.
i can see the techy distros doing it first, Debian ports, Gentoo, maybe Slackware if there is a big enough demand for it, and netBSD would be jumping at the chance too
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Once again /. falls victim to a reference to a technical article written by a clueless tech writer. The MS announcement clearly states deep integration with Visual Studio, which any developer or even casual technical person would know makes much more sense. However, as another poster pointed out, those of us that care about this kind of stuff already know about it about 3-7 days before it shows up here.
Every change is not progress, but there is no progress without change.
Good riddance. Back to Basic!
You've called already. Everyone who wanted to see it here and anywhere else has seen your silly call. Having been seen, it must not have been banned. Auto firing does not make you a better killer that taking the time to aim does. Auto firing wastes bullets and saves lives. You sir are a moron.
I assume it based on containers.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
There is only one statement: switch (and no break). It executes all cases at the same time.
They will name it QUAVA (tm)
Well if Microsoft is launching it, it's definitely going to be a huge success for a year (possibly two) before they kill it, leaving untold numbers of suckers, err, I mean "programmers" cursing at being dropped in the dirt once again.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Well actually not so silly. An article on the hundred year computer language provided good insights that recommend it. These insights among others fueled the scientists who built Perl 6, a new advanced language. Or more closer to home, a cousin of mine invented the bar code. He did it in an interesting fashion, by dragging his fingers through sand at the beach and having an epiphany, apparently. The point being that laser scanners did not exist then as far as I know. It is a kind of bootstrapping.
http://www.paulgraham.com/hund...
They are not ads, but suggestions and messages from carefully selected partners.
As far as I am concerned this "new" language is just a repacking of |Liquid>, which Microsoft tried to make look Open Source by moving it to github, and some journos and analysts promptly fell for it, despite the License being right there in the repo.
Microsoft invests heavily to own the future of quantum computing. While now paying lip service to Open Source software, they also aggressively seek software patents in this space.
I have no doubt, that they plan to do the same thing to quantum computing that they did to Linux based Android. They don't have to fear Open Source products if they can collect patent fees.
My start-up tries to build an Open Source quantum computing tool chain, while also trying to secure as many fundamental patents that we can think of, that we then plan to extend to all other Open Source QC projects. (As long as the current laws are on the books, a defensive patent portfolio is the only option to keep companies like MS in check).
We also developed a free AWS image, Bayesforge, where we try to curate all important Open Source tools in this space. (With a docker image to follow soon).
We are just a three guys start-up, but having recently been accepted into the Quantum Machine Learning stream of Creative Destruction Lab in Toronto, we hope to finally attract some more VC money. But no matter the level of financing, start-ups won't be able to secure the quantum computing future from the likes of MS if we can't achieve the same community commitment that powered projects like GNU and Linux.
I am really looking forward to get a proper feeling about what a quantum-based whatever can do. I guess that the APIs will be identical to the ones in the other .NET languages, perhaps with some restrictions, but delivering pretty much the same; that's why having access to the source code might be required. I also guess that the theoretical advantages of these new approaches could only be enjoyed in quantum computers of very difficult (at least, to me) access.
.NET Framework/Visual Studio. How are all these companies expecting to justify having to rebuild virtually everything from the ground up to comply with the dubious quantum label? A priori it seems very difficult to build hardware/software applying ideas on the lines of cats being there and/or not :)
I am quite skeptical about all this, but certainly willing to analyse the whole situation properly; and I happen to be very experienced in the
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
Auto firing does not make you a better killer that taking the time to aim does. Auto firing wastes bullets and saves lives.
That's why the military don't bother with machine guns and the standard weapon for soldiers nowadays is still the musket.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
i really don't understand the point of this exercise. for most bread-and-butter programming tasks, you can get most or all of the benefit of a (still hypothetical, mind) quantum co-processor with just one function, let's call it quantum_fourier_transform(). just with that, and a few classical reductions which Smart People will probably pre-wrap for you, you can run Shor's algorithm and all that sexy number theory.
apart from that, there's what? full-blown quantum system simulation (can't really imagine physics grad students needing to use Visual Studio, but even if so, it's pretty niche), some adiabatic optimization methods (for which, as with QFT, 99% of the benefit can just be black-boxed), Grover's algorithm (not clear if this would even be useful in practice, but could be mostly black-boxed anyway). am i missing something? i haven't looked at QC deeply since the 1990s, but it also doesn't look like anything really new has been done on the algorithms side. people are just waiting (and waiting, and waiting) for the first real scalable quantum computer hardware.
i'm just skeptical that programmers who are, by and large, baffled by first-order differential equations, will really need to program a QC directly. and the ones who could probably don't need whatever tinker-toy wrapper Microsoft is going to throw around it. maybe i'm being myopic, but i don't see what problem Microsoft is solving; then again, all they need to do is convince a handful of government bureaucrats to give them a boatload of patents, and it's free money for at least 17 years.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Given that a quantum bit can be a 0 and a 1 at the same time:
dim ij as qbit
do
ij = ij;
print(ij);
while (ij);
end
I'll be it requires you to have Internet Explorer installed.
Machine guns don't repeat more than 3 times anymore. You have never been in the military.