I have often noted with intense interest that people who program in particular languages seem also to fall into certain patterns of thinking about the problems they solve. Kenneth Iverson, the inventor of the APL programming language spoke to this point in his 1980 Turing award lecture entitled “Notation as a tool of thought”. The thesis of that paper is the general idea that “the advantages of executability and universality found in programming languages can be effectively combined, in a single coherent language…”.

Fast forward to 2007 – here we are in a world where there are not five, but hundreds, if not thousands of programming languages. For many who program in a specific language, the choice to learn a specific syntax and accompanying abstractions is a decision not taken lightly. Some even describe the experience in what might be termed a religious posture.

So about a month ago, Microsoft announced, through the blog of Jim Huginin, support for an extension to the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR) to better support dynamic languages such a Python, Ruby, JavaScript (ECMAScript 3.0), and Visual Basic. Its name? The Dynamic Language Runtime, or DLR. Also, it is interesting to note that the source code for this project is being made freely available under permissive license on Microsoft’s codeplex.

It is also very interesting to note, in case you do not know, that Jim Hugunin wrote the Java implementation of Python known as Jython, wrote the compiler for a very interesting extension to Java that is helpful in managing change among large numbers of classes called AspectJ, and most recently has been responsible for the IronPython project, whose goal is to make the Python language fully available on the .NET platform.

And to add more into the mix, when we look at the new functional extensions to C# 3.0 that are an outgrowth of Anders Hejlberg’s LINQ project, it becomes clear that .NET is moving toward an unprecedented level of support for just about any modern programming language and style.

So, rather than reality following Iverson’s idea, it seems instead that the way things are turning out is that the .NET platform will support static and dynamic languages, which opens the door for many, many more programmers, already well skilled in their programming ways, to leverage the platform.

I have to confess I find the entire prospect extremely exciting. And it is clear to me that Hugunin is dedicated to including other language designers in the process of developing the DLR so that there is a “community process”. That is certainly the right thing to be doing in today’s climate.

Every language has its lexical structure, its syntax, its keywords, identifiers, and taken together, I argue that becoming proficient in a particular programming language is equivalent to taking on a particular view of the world. The view of that world is based very much on how the language abstracts the hardware and allows the programmer to conceptualize the system they are encoding.

So, as I ponder over these differences (let’s call them cultural differences for the moment) that exist between programmers that are influenced by the language, I am even more interested in how these cultural differences will be bridged, and even more importantly, how to create situations for us to look beyond our differences towards an even higher set of goals that could serve to motivate everyone to create better software, regardless of their language world view.

I think that these issues are rather important to look at, as people, not the languages, are the ones who actually move things forward.