Summary
The reason for the radio silence on my part lately is due to me being hired by Microsoft! What does this mean for my other projects?
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I am as of two weeks ago an employee at Microsoft. A bit of an about-face from a career perspective. Well let's be honest, I didn't really have much of a career before this. Open-source programming language designer and blogger sounds impressive, but it didn't exactly put food on my table, or clothes on my back.
I now get to focus my firehose of ideas towards the Microsoft corporation from within, and whether they want it or not, they are going to get a full blasting of my ideas and opinions on everything related to technology and software. This is one of the first times in my life where I really feel like I have a chance to make a big difference, and it is very exciting. It is my view that the software technology landscape has been very stagnant for the last 10 years, and that we are going to see some major changes in the next 10. I plan on being a big part of that.
Concerning my old projects, the OOTL (Object Oriented Template Library) is more or less abandoned, however, there is still some interesting code in it and I hope that someone else takes the idea and runs with it. The Unimperative languages is suspended indefinitely. The YARD recursive descent parsing library is also suspended but has a small chance of finding its way into an article.
Finally the most important project is Heron. All of the previous work on Heron is still public domain, in fact that can never change. However, for legal reasons, I can't comment on whether or not I am pursuing Heron at Microsoft. I can say that if Heron was to be pursued by me at Microsoft, Microsoft would hold ownership of all my work, and I wouldn't be able to talk about it without special clearance.
That's it for now, I hope to try and continue writing here on occasion. Thanks to everyone who has helped guide and encourage me over the last couple of years, it's been a blast!
I've enjoyed seeing Heron grow via your blog - it would be a pity if it was now lost to the community. Maybe you could convince MS to be nice like Google and let you work on Heron 1 day a week ?
> I've enjoyed seeing Heron grow via your blog - it would be > a pity if it was now lost to the community. > Maybe you could convince MS to be nice like Google and > d let you work on Heron 1 day a week ?
That is a definite possibility. The real challenge is to keep any research opened to the public.
Pity you had to stop the really interesting one :(
Perhaps you could target Herron as a .NET language, that way you would get an intermediate language to compile to (making the compiler easier) and support for great runtime features like garbage collection.
> Good luck with the proper job :) > > Pity you had to stop the really interesting one :( > > Perhaps you could target Herron as a .NET language, that > way you would get an intermediate language to compile to > (making the compiler easier) and support for great runtime > features like garbage collection.
Thanks a lot Howard. Your idea is a good one. By the way I've been working on a paper on structural subtyping which I plan on submitting to a conference, and I've acknowledged you, thanks to your contribution to some of the discussions on previous blog posts. An older version of the article is posted at http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1352 or I can send you the most recent version if you send me your email address at cdiggins@gmail.com .
> > Good luck with the proper job :) > > > > Pity you had to stop the really interesting one :( > > > > Perhaps you could target Herron as a .NET language, > that > > way you would get an intermediate language to compile > to > > (making the compiler easier) and support for great > runtime > > features like garbage collection. > > Thanks a lot Howard. Your idea is a good one. By the way > I've been working on a paper on structural subtyping which > I plan on submitting to a conference, and I've > acknowledged you, thanks to your contribution to some of > the discussions on previous blog posts. An older version > of the article is posted at > http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1352 or I can send you > the most recent version if you send me your email address > at cdiggins@gmail.com .
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