LINQ as the Nuevo Rorschach Test

It’s been great seeing the (very positive) reactions to LINQ in the blogosphere. What’s amusing to me is how LINQ is like a Rorschach test for data access. If you’re unfamiliar with the Rorschach test, it’s basically a psychological test where you’re asked to look at ink blots and respond with shapes you see. How does this relate to LINQ? Well, what’s interesting to me is how everyone that looks at LINQ reacts in terms of technology they use. For example, I’ve heard or seen people write how LINQ/DLinq/XLinq is based solely on:

· SQL

· Foxpro

· Ruby-On-Rails

· SQL/J

· Fortran

· Hibernate (and the multitude of ORM tools)

· Haskell (and the multitude of functional programming languages)

· XPath

· XQuery

· COmega

· Delphi

It’s a great thing that when someone sees a LINQ query, it’s instantly obvious to them what it doesJ