Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Erik Meijer to Demo Volta for the First Time at OOPSLA 2007

Erik Meijer, the "Creator of LINQ," will make four—count 'em, four!—presentations to the ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA) 2007 conference in Montréal, Canada, from October 21 through 24, 2007.

Democratizing the Cloud with Volta (Demo)

Volta is a Tesla incubator project that's charged with development of LINQ 2.0. According to Erik, "We've made very good progress in turning ideas into working code. In particular, the declarative tier splitting is really cool."

This is the first scheduled public demo of Volta's tool-assisted approach to dividing client/server applications into n-tier projects automatically. Here's the latest abstract from Erik's updated paper:

Programming distributed data-intensive web and mobile applications is gratuitously hard. As the world is moving more and more towards the software as services model, we have to come up with practical solutions to build distributed systems that are approachable for normal programmers. Just like Visual Basic democratized programming Windows by removing much of the boilerplate, such as message pumps and window handles, that contributed more to the problem than to the solution, we propose a toolkit of language extensions, APIs, and tools that do the same for web programming. As a result, ordinary programmers can concentrate on the essential aspects of building distributed and mobile applications such as partitioning and flowing code and data across tiers, deployment, security, etc. without getting bogged down in low level details.

Here's a link to Erik's earlier "LINQ 2.0: Democratizing the Cloud" paper, as well as Mary Jo Foley's August 8 2007 A (Microsoft) Code Name a Day: Volta and April 23, 2007 Volta: Microsoft’s dev platform in the Cloud? posts. Here's my original post March 16, 2007 "LINQ 2.0" in Early Returns from QCon 2007, London and subsequent May 18, 2007 Erik Meijer and LINQ 2.0 - Round 2 and August 2, 2007 QCon 2007 and Erik Meijer Coming to San Francisco November 7 - 9 items.

Confessions of a Used Computer Language Salesman (Essay)

Erik wrote "Confessions of a Used Programming Language Salesman: Getting the Masses Hooked on Haskell" for The 11th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP 2006), held in Portland, Oregon on September 18-20, 2006, but his PDF file doesn't carry the ICFP copyright. Here's the OOPSLA abstract:

Programmers in the real world wrestle every day to overcome the impedance mismatch between relational data, objects, and XML. For the past ten years we have been working on solving this problem by applying principles from functional programming, in particular monads and comprehensions. By viewing data as monads and formulating queries as comprehensions, it becomes possible to unify the three data models and their corresponding programming languages instead of considering each as a separate special case. To bring these theoretical ideas within the reach of mainstream programmers, we have worked tirelessly on transferring functional programming technology from pure Haskell, via Comega to the upcoming versions of C# 3.0 and Visual Basic 9 and the LINQ framework. Functional programming has finally reached the masses, except that it is called Visual Basic instead of Lisp, ML, or Haskell!

I first wrote about this paper in my May 16, 2006 Erik Meijer Promotes LINQ at Expo-C 2006 post, but this might be the paper's first formal presentation.

Lost in translation: Formalizing proposed extensions to C# (Paper)

Erik's giving this paper in conjunction with Gavin Bierman (Microsoft Research Cambridge) and Mads Torgersen. Here's the OOPSLA abstract:

Current real-world software applications typically involve heavy use of relational and XML data and their query languages. Unfortunately object-oriented languages and database query languages are based on different semantic foundations and optimization strategies. The resulting "ROX impedance mismatch" currently makes life very difficult for developers. Microsoft Corporation is currently developing extensions to the .NET framework to facilitate easier processing of non-object-oriented data models. Part of this project (known as "LINQ") includes various extensions to the .NET languages to leverage this support. In this paper we consider the current proposals for C# 3.0, the next version of the C# programming language. We give both an informal introduction to the new language features, and also a precise formal account by defining a translation from C# 3.0 to C# 2.0. This translation also demonstrates how these language extensions do not require any changes to the underlying CLR.

Apparently, Gavin's still at work on the paper, but here's a link to an earlier related presentation, "Formalizing and extending C] type inference (Work in progress)" that Gavin presented at the 2007 International Workshop on Foundations and Developments of Object-Oriented Languages (FOOL/WOOD '07).

LINQ from the Source (Demo)

Erik and Ted Neward (Ted Neward and Associates) will join in delivering this 3.5-hour demo that Erik says will be an "introduction to the various LINQ parts with lots of code samples and many questions from the audience. It's great to see that LINQ is catching on!" Here's the OOPSLA abstract:

Language Integrated Query (LINQ) is one of the hot technologies in the next version of Visual Studio. In this session, hosted by one of the designers of VB9, C# 3.0, LINQ to Objects, LINQ to XML, and LINQ to SQL, we will drill down into all the gory technical details behind LINQ, as well as its practical applicability to modern development projects, from large-scale enterprise systems to "tiny webapps on a big database" projects. This is a unique opportunity to get a first hand account of this new technology, the design process, and historical context.

Ted Neward is the author of the infamous "Object/Relational Mapping is the VietNam of Computer Science" essay.

Update 8/15/2007: Unrelated links have moved to LINQ Updates for 8/15/2007.

0 comments: