Any insight on Microsoft's new M programming language?

Question

Does anyone have any insight on microsoft's new M programming language? Why? What type? When? What?

Answer 1

There's this gathering in a couple weeks? PDC, I think it's called? :)

Answer 2

It's "D" - not Digital Mars D - renamed.

For more info.

Answer 3

I'm no insider, and the Mary Jo Foley article below is from June (so there must be considerable updates), but in the article Mary explores the rumours around a new Declarative Model-driven language that she (and if memory serves, .NET Rocks) referred to as D.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1430

I'm going to take a flyer on connecting the dots here, and I could be completely wrong, but perhaps the Declaritive Model-driven language formerly known as D is now called M?

Back in the summer (again, there have got to be updates), one of the (many) goals of Oslo was to introduce a UML-like language that would actually be worth the effort, as the Model Diagram would be kept in synch w/ the code all of the time. (As opposed to one of those nice-looking, not-quite-reflective of current reality, Visio UML diagrams)

Answer 4

Don Box gave a presentation at PDC.

If you don't have time for a video, I found this summary on Oslo to be helpful.

Answer 5

"M" stands for the language family that comes with oslo. It basically consists of two languages and a data representation format.

• MSchema Defines schemas for data instances. Quite comparable to XSD and DTD.
• MGraph JSON-like format for capturing concrete data instances.
• MGrammar Defines grammars for textual DSLs. Could also be looked at as a Unicode-to-MGraph-tranformation language.

Read more here: What Oslo is and is not

Answer 6

I've written a long article about Oslo, in which I explain why Oslo is confusing, and hopefully explain where Microsoft is headed with it.

http://dvanderboom.wordpress.com/2009/01/17/why-oslo-is-important/