Chasing a trail or chasing our tail History of .net from a PL perspective

Using .net as an example we’ll go over the technical decisions that influenced how todays languages look like. We will look at some key technologies that enabled the creation of .net, the reasons for its creation and the origin of its core features.

Video of the conference (with video starting with at my talk. The whole conference is in that video) :

I have created the following diagram to make following the topics of the talk simpler. There are many ways to link these, and

Resources

Microsoft early history

• Microsoft: key facts- Irish Times
• History of Microsoft - Wikipedia
• The History of .net from Richard Campbell from .Net Rocks

Virtual Machines

• Many BCPL papers and links by Martin Richards
• Z-Machine talk by Ross McKinlay
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UCSD_Pascal

ML family of programming languages

• Standard ML history
• The History of Standard ML: Ideas, Principles, Culture

Java and the JVM

• History of Java
• James Gosling talk about the beinnings of Java

Lighting and early days of .Net

• The history of C#
• History of F# by Don Syme
• Interesting discussion about tail calls in C#
• History of Mono
• .NET Framework

.NET Generics

• Design and Implementation of Generics for the .NET Common Language Runtime - Paper - Andrew Kennedy , Don Syme
• Generics in C#
• How Generics were added to .Net
• Generics in the common type system

Don Syme and F#

• History of F# by Don Syme

Other resources

• (The evolution of C#: Lead designer describes modernization journey, breaks it down about getting func-y)[https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/11/the_evolution_of_c_lead/]
• Why No One Uses Functional Languages. / Wadler, Philip. In: ACM Sigplan Notices, Vol. 33, No. 8, 08.1998, p. 23-27.
• Why hasn’t functional programming taken over yet The answer by Eric Lippert in this thread

Final words

If you enjoyed this talk and the subject, I have done some other talks about history and philosophy of Programming languages:

• A brief and incomplete history of programming languages - Curry On
• Keynote: Inviting everyone to the party

Be warned, history of PL is an appealing rabbit hole. If you want to delve (a lot) deeper into the history of PL the whole series of books on based on the HoPL conferences books are a great resource.