language parallax

One demo that I did get a chance to see at OOPSLA was Microsoft’s LINQ project.

It focuses on integrating SQL and C#. I’m not certain of the whole scope of the project, but the aspects that come across in the demo are the mixed-syntax editors which allow queries to be directly embedded in C# code.

In some sense, this sort of thing is not as ambitious as the other language-aware projects I’ve written about. It’s not defined in terms of some grand Language object. But on the other hand, it has chosen to focus on the two most popular types of languages: OO and Relational, building specifically tailored solutions for that “impedence mismatch”.

Over time — and by getting this in front of a large number of .NET programmers — this architecture could actually win out over the systems that are starting focusing on the very abstract idea of “language”. I think eventually LINQ will have to be defined more explicitely in terms of Language (if I understand where it’s going), but there’s nothing stopping them from factoring it that way. And they will have a lot of real-world use cases to guide their evolution.