A glimpse into a new programming language under development at Microsoft

also from MSR, Koka[0] has effect types and a sweet online repl!

[0] http://rise4fun.com/koka/tutorial

I'm going to ramble a little below, so I'll get to the point up front: is there even a new language here? I don't mean in the sense that Rust seems to attempt what is being hand waved about in the submission, but that the linked blog post states

> I’ve given a few glimpses into this work over the years. In the months to come, I will start sharing more details. My goal is to eventually open source this thing, but...

We'll have to wait and see, I guess. I also found this quote a bit odd

> There are other candidates early in their lives, too, most notably Rust and D. But hey, my team works at Microsoft, where there is ample C# talent and community just an arm’s length away.

D is hardly early in its life, but there is something about the whole "my team works at Microsoft, where there is ample C# talent" bit that is so very Microsoft, and I don't mean because it mentions Microsoft and C#, but in the sense of how they tend to work there. At least, this is my outside view, based mostly on what they promise vs. actually deliver in the C++ world, and where their interest constantly seem to fall short. Of course, you can't blame Microsoft for being interested in advancing Microsoft.

With that out of the way, and being up front that the rest of this comment is unnecessary, I wonder why this is on the front page of Lambda the Ultimate. It's become a favourite site of mine as I've recently become a lot more interested in language implementations. I'm certain the comments on the article will make it worthy, but as it stands, and with my comments above out of the way, I don't see what it offers. It's just hand waving about some ideal language that doesn't (fully) exist yet. The actual answer to my question of why it is on the front page is because Charles Torre can make front page posts, but just be aware that he works at Microsoft and hypes up their behaviour (that I'm admittedly not so pleased with) often. I know he is, like me, actually interested in language implementations, and has made far more worthy contributions on LtU than I ever have, but the front page of LtU is usually a bit more grounded.

> You know, the guys who work on Haskell, ported OCAML to .net and generally do a lot of awesome stuff.

Not exactly. The guys who developed F# based the core language mostly on OCaml and borrowed some ideas from Haskell, but are not the same as the people who developed Haskell.

Sweet, in 4 years they can completely remove all support for it and start again!

    The idea that MS is out to envelope developers by enticing 
    them into a language that requires massive cash outlays or
    *ongoing licensing fees* is not supported by reality.

...

    The only requirement being that they run on a Windows OS

Mhm.

Yes, I suppose you can run some C# on a non-windows machine, but it'll have bugs, break, some libraries won't be supported and there's no tooling support.

...but don't worry, you can happily tell everyone how free and open source it is. That's really important!

(by comparison, have a look at go which actually bothered to make a commitment to supporting various platforms; and don't even start with that whole 'xamarin is awesome' stuff; yes it is, but it in no ways acts as a caveat for microsoft's 'we'll make the spec public, that's good enough right?' behaviour)