How Microsoft is changing the programming world • Hacker News Board

Re: How Microsoft is changing the programming world

#21

Post by cabalamat » Wed, Jun 23, 2010, 4:26 PM UTC

The other day I was browsing through computer books. One, on LINQ for VB, seemed very enthusiastic on this radical new technology Microsoft had brought out -- and the example they used to illustrate this was something Smalltalk had 30 years ago.

Incidently, Smalltalk isn't normally considered a functional programming language (do doubt because object orientation overshadowed it) but with its closures (called blocks) and select:, collect:, reject:, inject: etc methods it seems (to me) as much so as Scheme.

Re: How Microsoft is changing the programming world

#22

Post by cabalamat » Wed, Jun 23, 2010, 4:36 PM UTC

georgieporgie wrote: post #6

This article reeks of bitterness. I find it curious that he seems to knock 'Dick' for not being well-rounded enough for his tastes. If his company doesn't pay him to develop Linux products, why on earth would he learn about developing for Linux? Or other languages. Or tools. I'm all for picking up new languages (learning PHP changed some of my approaches to C++), but there's a lot to be said for sticking to your tool…

> If his company doesn't pay him to develop Linux products, why on earth would he learn about developing for Linux?

If programming is just a job, and you don't care about it when you leave the workplace, that's a reasonable attitude.

If, OTOH, programming is something you care about and that actually interests you (which is true of nearly all good programmers), it's an attitude you won't have.

Re: How Microsoft is changing the programming world

#23

Post by Aaronontheweb » Wed, Jun 23, 2010, 4:37 PM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #10

georgieporgie wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Visual Studio programmers that can write a makefile are not many I'm curious why you think it would be important or valuable for a VS developer to write makefiles. Your subsequent statements seem to indicate that you believe it allowed MS to put more project complexity, hidden by the IDE. I don't particularly see anything wrong with that, but maybe I'm misunderstanding you. My view on this is: I write code to creat…

You write code to make sellable products and every avoidable complexity, every thing you don't understand in your code or build system will eventually come back as increased cost when you need to extend, adapt it to the next Microsoft OS or simply debug it in an environment that looks like what your clients use. Of you don't understand your build system, you really don't know what you are shippin.

So if I compiled my C# applications from the command line using a project file which I wrote from scratch in an XML editor, would that suddenly give me a better understanding of "how my code works?"

Oh wait, no it wouldn't.

Re: How Microsoft is changing the programming world

#24

Post by joeyh » Wed, Jun 23, 2010, 4:39 PM UTC

Watch various SPJ lecture videos for a take from the inside. He'll sometimes talk about working with collegues at MS to add things from FP to these mainstream languages.

Re: How Microsoft is changing the programming world

#25

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jun 23, 2010, 4:50 PM UTC

gruseom wrote: post #16

Wow, I have to pipe up here. The commenters so far are completely missing the point of this article. The author is making two observations, both of which are quite correct in my experience. First, the mainstream MS developer universe -- the overwhelming majority of it -- is parochial. People learn new things when MS release some new technology and not before. (I'm talking about the smart ones here. The mediocre ones…

[deleted]

Re: How Microsoft is changing the programming world

#26

Post by kenjackson » Wed, Jun 23, 2010, 4:53 PM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #10

georgieporgie wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Visual Studio programmers that can write a makefile are not many I'm curious why you think it would be important or valuable for a VS developer to write makefiles. Your subsequent statements seem to indicate that you believe it allowed MS to put more project complexity, hidden by the IDE. I don't particularly see anything wrong with that, but maybe I'm misunderstanding you. My view on this is: I write code to creat…

You write code to make sellable products and every avoidable complexity, every thing you don't understand in your code or build system will eventually come back as increased cost when you need to extend, adapt it to the next Microsoft OS or simply debug it in an environment that looks like what your clients use. Of you don't understand your build system, you really don't know what you are shippin.

How does knowing makefiles help you understand your build system if you're using VS? You do realize that it doesn't use Makefiles (at least, not by default).

With that said, I know people who the old VC project system inside and out. And I know tons of people who know MSBuild as well as the most build engineers I know in the Unix world know make.

Makefiles are an artifact of a particular build system. It is not foundational to all build systems. Understanding Makefiles is useful for the world in which you use make, but I fail to see why it would be useful in a world where they don't use make.

Re: How Microsoft is changing the programming world

#27

Post by Aaronontheweb » Wed, Jun 23, 2010, 4:55 PM UTC

gruseom wrote: post #16

Wow, I have to pipe up here. The commenters so far are completely missing the point of this article. The author is making two observations, both of which are quite correct in my experience. First, the mainstream MS developer universe -- the overwhelming majority of it -- is parochial. People learn new things when MS release some new technology and not before. (I'm talking about the smart ones here. The mediocre ones…

Here's the deal - I don't like being generalized as some sort of mind-slave to Microsoft's brain trust just because I prefer Visual Studio and C# over Eclipse and Java.

My choice of development platforms and tools doesn't mean that I'm inherently less curious about what else is available to me, and the author's generalization and yours would seem to indicate otherwise. What you're reading in the HN comments are the objections to this generalization.

If I had written this article and wrote it about how PHP developers don't know anything about unit testing, agile, JIT compilation, pre-caching, and whatever, a different audience of HN readers would be tearing it up in the comments right now.

Re: How Microsoft is changing the programming world

#28

Post by kenjackson » Wed, Jun 23, 2010, 4:56 PM UTC

cabalamat wrote: post #21

The other day I was browsing through computer books. One, on LINQ for VB, seemed very enthusiastic on this radical new technology Microsoft had brought out -- and the example they used to illustrate this was something Smalltalk had 30 years ago. Incidently, Smalltalk isn't normally considered a functional programming language (do doubt because object orientation overshadowed it) but with its closures (called blocks)…

Which book?

Re: How Microsoft is changing the programming world

#29

Post by seiji » Wed, Jun 23, 2010, 5:55 PM UTC

nathanwdavis wrote: post #11

The 'Dick' he writes about didn't know functional programming concepts in early 2000s. If HN existed at that time, you probably could have said that about the HN readers. OOP was the big deal then and the majority of non-MS programmers didn't grasp functional style either. I sure didn't in 2001. The author is an idiot.

You're missing the age of Dick. If Dick is 18, sure, it's excusable. If Dick has been programming for 30 years, his lack of knowledge isn't so excusable (assuming one's goal is to amass 'knowledge').

So many Kids These Days feel the entirety of Computer Science and Programming has been developed since 2000. I'm pretty sure LISP and functional programming existed in literature, learning, and practice before early 2000s.

Re: How Microsoft is changing the programming world

#30

Post by cageface » Wed, Jun 23, 2010, 6:08 PM UTC

kenjackson wrote: post #4

It is an arsurd article. I can point you to web devs on LAMP from the same era that were equally ignorant of other languages or paradigms. The real question for developers isn't, "what things, do I consider important, do you know?", but rather "what have you shipped?" If the only language you know is C++, but you're the lead dev for the Halo series, that gives me a lot more respect than if you know 20 languages and y…

People that read this as an anti-Microsoft article are totally missing the point. I've met plenty of these "Dicks" and they're not necessarily bad programmers, they just work entirely within the MS domain, which is easy to do because it's pretty comprehensive.

Like the author, I commend Microsoft for using this influence to help bring functional techniques into the mainstream. The programming challenges we face today are more suited than ever to FP and the backing of a big vendor with mature, sophisticated tools is exactly the kind of boost FP has been waiting for. This can only be a good thing in the long run for Haskell, Clojure, Scala, Erlang etc.

I deplore a lot of Microsoft's business practices but the work they're doing in this area and in support of the Haskell team deserves kudos.