While in Cambridge, England recently for the

MSR Cambridge 10 year anniversary and

MSR Cambridge PhD Summer School (stay tuned for coverage on this on Channel 8...) I caught up with

Simon Peyton-Jones,

Erik Meijer and, very briefly (too briefly),

Butler Lampson to talk about what's going on inside Simon's head right now with respect to general purpose programming language evolution.





Trust me, it's most interesting and programmers should be excited about the thoughts in Simon's head these days. Join us for a really brief conversation (I think this is my shortest interview in the 3+ years I've been taking part in conversations here on Channel

9) with some of programming language design's best and brightest. Here, Simon clues us in to the nirvana of programming languages: Safe and Useful (effectful). Better just to listen in to Simon's excellent and succinct explanation of the holy grail

of general purpose programming languages.



Enjoy!



PS I will be interviewing Butler Lampson sometime in the future (when he's in Redmond). He's a rather prominent computer scientist with a rich history in making

systems that many of us rely on for a number of things...