[discussion of benefits and otherwise of .NET, C#, ..]
They have definitely managed to attract some attention, haven't they?-)
If we put language and other wars aside for the moment, there are a few
questions that haven't come up yet, the answers to which would interest
me (and seem relevant for this list):
1. once upon a time, some fearless Haskell implementers decided
that C is only almost a suitable portable assembler, and started
to work on an alternative design for that purpose, named C--.
Some of you have moved to Microsoft research labs, so is
there any chance that your ideas and experience had any
influence on the designs of .NET? Or did other parts of MS
invented everything (including problems) again, from scratch?
2. several non-oo languages seem to be in the process of acquiring an
implementation on top of C# or on top of the .NET VM. Most
developers have expressed mixed feelings here about the suitability
of the target, as far as language independence is concerned (bias
towards oo and procedural languages, etc.).
May I assume that any problems you've found will be fed back
to the .NET developers before everything gets frozen?
By announcing your various language re-targetting efforts, you
provide the support that the new platform depends on.
In contrast to Java, .NET advertizes language independence,
your compilation efforts come early in the race, _and_ MS has
quite a few researchers interested in declarative programming.
So if all of you could get your weight together and publish an
experts' report on how the platform could be improved so that
your efforts could add value for its customers, that might have
quite some influence if you do it early enough (ask the Pizza
shop what it means to be late;-).
Or is it too late already? It would really be a pity to have yet another
(more or less portable) platform out there that featured problems for
implementing functional languages by design.
Claus
