Anders Hejlsberg and Chris McConnell's reflections

Anders Hejlsberg and Chris McConnell: Reflections on LINQ, Desktop Search, WinFS, Functional and Intentional Programming is a video you just can't miss.

This interview started justifying WinFS dropout. McConnell identifies WinFS keypoints as:
. SQL Engine
. standart Schema
. Object Mapping 'stuff'

McConnell advocates LINQ as a better Object Mapping, and Desktop Search Engine as providing a schema that is a lot more practical at this point.

Hejlsberg is also on a pragmatic mood. He believes the smooth introduction of new paradigms to the programming model people already are familiarized ("mainstream more statically typed languages like C#") is the way to go. He also believes that "one of the really interesting aspects of functional programming is that for a certain class of problems if you can express them functionally you stand in a much better chance of executing them efficiently on many core machines."

One last thing worth mentioning on the Intentional Programming arena: "to what extend we can teach programmers not to write instances of the program, but rather write the classes (the code generators)". Yeap, I can relate to that.