Lunch with Bill Venners and Bruce Eckel

Yesterday I had the pleasure of having lunch with Bill Venners and Bruce Eckel. Bill
runs Artima.com, a cool site with lots
of interesting content. Bruce, of course, is the noted author of Thinking
in C++
, and MindView.net. Bruce taught
me C++, or at least his book "Using
C++
" helped a bunch, way back in the early 1990s before I came to Microsoft.

They were here doing interviews, and we (Anders, Dan
Fernandez
, and I) talked a fair bit about language design and philosophy with
them. Anders couldn't be there the whole time, so I fielded questions the rest of
the time. One of the best ones that Bruce asked was, "How did the design team know
that they were doing the right thing, absent real feedback. How did you avoid creating
problems the way the C++ committee did?" (Bruce can say that since he was on the C++
standards committee for a number of years).

The answer is a two-part answer. All of us on the design team were real-world programmers,
and Anders has a very practical approach to language design. The second reason is
that we had a large group of framework programmers using C# as we developed it, and
they were not shy when they found it too hard to do things with our current design.

A very enjoyable hour. Bruce has a blog.