I think TechEd 2005 is shaping up to be awesome again this year. They just posted the list of sessions (well, most of the sessions anyway). I can’t link directly to the architecture sessions, but you can filter the list to show just one track at a time if you want to. We haven’t got speakers or abstracts posted yet, but I can tell you that we’ve got some good speakers lined up like Scott, Ted, Roger, Rocky, and Steve.

Of the ARC track sessions, I think I’m most looking forward to “Building and Using a Software Factory”. I jokingly call this session “Here’s the Beef, Chris Sells”. Chris blogged that he wanted a concrete example of a software factory. It turns out that we’ve been working on a concrete example since before OOPSLA. In the TechEd session, we’ll see how far Michael, Jack and Keith have gotten since October.

Jochen just posted a list of known issues for the Dec 04 CTP release of the DSL Toolkit. I have not had enough time to play with this. Anyone know where I can get 3-4 more hours a day? 😄

Jochen and Stuart both blogged that the walkthrus for the December release of the DSL toolkit are now available for download. Given the relative lack of documentation, this is a good thing.

Several people have pointed out Herb Sutter’s great article on concurrency entitled The Free Lunch Is Over. When I blogged last week about new possible features of “full-grown” OO languages I mentioned dynamic typing but I didn’t think about concurrency. I think Herb is right: “programming languages…will increasingly be forced to deal well with concurrency” as applications get more CPU bound. Maybe I need to take another look at Comega (or Cw). Cw extends C# in two areas – data typing/querying and concurrency. The concurrency extension used to be called Polyphonic C#, but the name got changed when it merged with Xen/X#. (BTW, there’s a new Cw release (v1.0.2) but no specifics as to changes other than no longer needed VS.NET 2003 to be installed in order to use it.)

Cw adds the idea of asynchronous methods and something called chords – sets of methods with the same method body. The chord method body in only executed when all the associated methods have been called. In the simple buffer tutorial, the buffer class has a synchronous Get method and asynchronous Put method. If you call Get before Put, it blocks until Put is called, then the method body is executed. If you call Put before Get, then the Put call returns immediately (it is async after all) but the call is queued so that when Get is called, the method body is executed immediately. FYI, the Cw docs have a variety of other tutorials of async methods and chords.

BTW, speaking of my post on full grown OO languages…My father suggested that I not jump to conclusions regarding the X-develop‘s support for what they term “toy languages or little domain specific languages”. In fact, Hans Kratz of Omnicore (which makes X-develop) had this to say:

This comment on our website was not intended to bash DSLs at all. Instead we wanted to make clear that the plugin API in X-develop is powerful enough to allow integrating support for “full-grown” languages without placing arbitrary restrictions on language complexity.

For a language developer/integrator this is a plus regardless if he wants to integrate support for a DSL or “full-grown” programming language.

Makes sense. Maybe I was just too sensitive to the use of the word “toy” so close in proximity to “DSL”. Sorry about that Hans.

After seeing it on TSS.net, I checked out the X-develop product website. X-develop is a new multi-language cross-platform IDE that supports both .NET languages like VB.NET, C# and J# as well as Java. It includes support for all the .NET 2.0 features like generics as well as new Java 5.0 features like generics, varargs, enums and boxing.

When I checked out the website, I noticed a section covering “Custom Languages“. Here’s another example of bias against DSLs – this time in favor of “full grown OO languages”:

“The [X-develop] language plugin API is not limited to toy languages or little domain specific languages. Instead it supports full grown OO languages. In fact the support for Java, C#, J# and Visual Basic.NET is implemented as language plugins.” (Emphasis added)

This reminds me of the same kind of bias that was leveled against classic VB. Classic VB was valuable primarily because it was limited in scope and capability. But what it gave up in capability it gained in productivity. Along the same lines, DSLs are valuable because they are little, because they only focus on a single problem domain.

What exactly would be the value of another “full-grown OO language”? What features would be in a new full grown language that isn’t already in Java/J#, C# or VB.NET? The only feature I can think of is dynamic language support such as type inference and duck typing a la Ruby and Boo. What non-domain specific language features are you still waiting for?