Lang.NET 2009 at Ted Leung on the Air

Gratis ago ad Ted Leung for posting his summary of Lang.NET 2009. It seems like every time I see one of his summaries, my reading and projects lists grow.

Newspeak and Hopscotch
More reading here. Ted also links indirectly to the video of Gilad Bracha's talk.

Powershell

[Jeffrey Snover] seemed to think that UNIX shells could gain a fair amount of PowerShell’s capabilities by recognizing that pipes ship bytestreams, adopting a data format (like JSON or XML) for those byte streams, and proceeding from there. That might be true technically, but that would be a huge cultural change for that community.

Hm... imagine a /usr/bin_json/ sitting alongside /usr/bin. The first prototypes of the utilities therein could be based on David Beazley's tutorial "A Curious Course on Coroutines and Concurrency". (Start at slide 34 of the presentation slides.)

Monads

[Erik Meijer] then used mindless symbol pushing to demonstrate that [IEnumerable and IObservable] were duals of each other, and that they obeyed the rules for monads.

I'm so far behind on terminology... what the heck is a monad? Google suggests it's what Pythonistas would call a list comprehension or a generator expression.

Favorite Quote

I suspect that this is the only conference I will go to all year where Macs are the minority.