It's not often that we can get two minds of Erik Meijer's and Herb Sutter's caliber together for an impromptu technical conversation during Christmas break at Microsoft... Well, we did and the next hour or so contains a lot of intelligence, knowledge, wisdom, and passion. This is one of the more heated E2Es we've had the pleasure to be a part of and we think you'll agree. Herb and Erik are among the brightest of our trove of bright-minded engineers. We thank Erik and Herb for being so flexible and accommodating (there was no specific topical plan for the conversation other than the obvious—Herb and what he knows so well, C++).
Herb Sutter is an Architect on the VC++ team, a member of the C++ Standards Committee, a polished technical speaker and a super capable programmer. He is an ardent advocate of native code and works with the industry to move C++ in the direction it needs to go as general purpose computing evolves. As you know, Erik Meijer is a functional programming fundamentalist, a C9 celebrity, a master of mathematical duality and an unusually productive innovator (LINQ, "Volta," and Rx, are a few of his recent accomplishments). Erik is also the Chief Interrogation Officer for C9's Expert to Expert series. In this case, given functional programming's conceptual fingerprint showing up in almost all general purpose programming languages, including C++ with the addition of lambdas, putting Erik and Herb in the same room was sure to create some geeky technical magic. This post captures exactly what happened, unedited and raw. It's one of the best E2Es to date! Thank you, Erik and Herb! Keep pushing the envelope.
Tune in. Enjoy. Learn.
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