C# 3.0

There was a recent post on slashdot sending people to view a video of Anders talking about C# 3.0. For those who don't know, Anders Hejlsberg was the creator of Delphi and the Object Pascal language. Microsoft hired him away from Borland to oversee their .NET languages. While I think C++.NET is an abomination, C# is an amazing staticly typed language. It has stayed away from all of Java's problems and has adopted a much more agile flavor: very ruby-ish in nature. I've been reading the O'Reilly book on C# 2.0 and I've been impressed, but 3.0 looks like it will blow all other static typed languages out of the water. Kudos to Anders for giving us a language worth using. Now, I wonder about performance...

Another thing I found interesting about this video was Anders continual discussion of the "shape" of data. I've heard this term before (I think it was in Code Complete), but it had been a while. Acutally using C# to show the difference between rectangular data and heirarchical data was very interesting to me. It is something I'll have to start thinking about on a regular basis.