Static Typing, Dynamic Typing or maybe both?

Erik Meijer has a new interview up on Channel 9. Erik is one of the people at Microsoft who I have a ton of respect for. Erik is a brilliant computer scientist (he used to be a university computer science professor) who is currently working in a product group creating the next generation of Visual Basic .NET and C#. One of his many gifts is the ability to explain things very well. That is why I recommend this interview.

The whole interview is very interesting and informative but the first 5-10 minutes of it may be particularly interesting to beginners in programming and computer science. At the beginning of the interview Erik gives a great explanation of the differences between static and dynamically typed languages. This is a pretty important concept for someone who is evaluating a programming language. And of course as a long time Visual Basic fan myself I love how he explains that Visual Basic .NET is a language that includes some of the best features of both static and dynamically typed languages. If you have students (or computer science professionals) who think Visual Basic is some sort of toy language this is an interesting discussion for them to hear.

The interview also includes some discussion of LINQ which is a new addition to Visual Basic .NET and C# that allows data to be searched and otherwise manipulated using XML. Erik also talks about how ideas are moved from research to product groups and why that often takes a lot more time than people expect it would. There is a lot of good information in this one interview. Highly recommended.