Lambda the Ultimate

We’re at the point now with LINQ where we’re really starting to take a serious look beyond the language features, cool as they are, and pondering how these features are going to integrate with the UI. (It’s not like we haven’t thought about it at all, we have, but now we’re really taking a look at things end-to-end.) And so we started by coming up with a “language UI taxes” list that I’m shocked we haven’t put into a more concrete form until now. The various taxes that a language feature is going to have to pay include, but are not limited to...

What follows is quite a long list of things you have to think about designing the IDE.

I am one of those that think it is [o]ne of the wonderful things about working on a compiler... that... [y]ou don’t have any UI, but that doesn't mean, of course, that IDEs aren't here to stay...

We still have a long way to go, I think, in terms of understanding the subtle relationship between language features and IDEs (and vice versa). I wonder when this issue will enter the PL curriculum.