GoingDeep: The Future of C#

It's always a pleasure to get a chance to sit down and geek out with Anders Hejlsberg. Anders is a Microsoft Technical Fellow (a Technical Fellow is the highest ranking technical position at Microsoft) and programming language design master. He's the creator of C# and one of the founders of .NET. Anders is an expert language design craftsman. C# is one of the most popular languages Microsoft has created and certainly the most widely used language by developers who target the .NET platform.

Erik Meijer, Expert to Expert host, programming language designer and occasionally-radical category theoritician, has spent many years working with Anders and the C# team. As you may know, Erik has been a key contributor to the addition of functional constructs to C#. 

Here, Erik and Anders wax on topics ranging from the design of C# 4.0's dynamic keyword (what's the thinking behind the thinking) to the potential near and far future of the C# language (and general purpose imperative programming, generally). Anders also spends some time at the whiteboard explaining C# 4.0's support for covariance and contravariance. Of course, we can't forget about concurrency and parallelism, so we don't.

As you might expect, the conversation takes some interesting jaunts into various programming language design rabbit holes. For example, Anders discusses the notion of creating a new language to support new problem domains versus extending current languages to meet the needs of developers who need to express solutions to complex problems (so, how do you make a language like C# more dynamic in the sense that it can readily help developers solve problems that the language was not initially designed to solve?). We talk about the work being done on a service-oriented C# compiler (compiler as a service), C# as an ESDL container (or as an EDSL itself to be hosted in other environments...) and much more. This is a fantastic conversation with some of Microsoft's true visionaries. Enjoy.