As Eric points out, on Wednesday Bruce Eckel and Bill Venners came on campus to talk to members of the C# team. They interviewed Anders for a recently published article (Bill) as well as a series of interviews with industry luminaries (Bruce) that will be made available on CD-ROM. I’m hoping to get the audio from the interview and place it on MSDN for anyone interested.
I should also now mention how cool it is to work with the C# team, and how it can be difficult at times to not spontaneously avert my eyes, bow, and start chanting “I’m not worthy, I’m not worthy” during meetings.
Anders isn’t what I would’ve expected…he’s a really nice guy, he’s funny, he’s not socially awkward (a rarity for engineers), he’s well versed in a variety of topics, and he’s someone that can comfortably present to either a room full of CEO’s or hardcore engineers. He basically rocks, and I’m glad he works for MS and not our competitors :)
As a newbie to the team, it was enlightening to hear the ins-and-outs of the language design process and the choices the team had to make when first designing C#. I noticed some general themes that arose during the language design process discussion, like simplicity, elegance, and actual value and I then became cognizant of just how obvious they are in the language, and also how difficult making those design decisions must be. You too can hear all about, and I’ll blog with a link to the audio once its on MSDN.