Conspiracy Theory #1

[Bill Baxter]

On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 5:35 AM, Martin Hanson <mhanson at btinternet.com> wrote:
> I noticed the "Metaprogramming in D : Some Real-world Examples" Meeting was held at Microsoft Headquarters. With Google Go now the flavour of the month will there be big support from Microsoft for D to counteract the Go onslaught...
>
> I think we should be told...

No conspiracy as far as I know.  The NWCPP meetings are just held on
the MS campus because someone who worked at Microsoft and was a part
of NWCPP got Microsoft to agree to provide the meeting space.  I
volunteered to talk about D because I enjoyed using it at my last job.
 It's more or less just a coincidence that I now work at MS and live
near the guy who created D.  The talk had nothing to do with my day
job, unfortunately for me.

MS is still crazy in love with C# and all things .NET.  I think
systems programming languages in general are considered to be too
niche to be worth the investment.  It takes a several-hundred million
dollar market to even start to get MS interested.  And there's still a
strong preference for technologies which can boost Windows sales (i.e.
that will only work on Windows).  So an open-source platform-agnostic
systems programming language has very little chance of getting the
interest of the business-heads at MS.  Such a language probably *is*
interesting to a lot of the tech people working int the trenches, but
they're still a niche audience.  Just look at the increasing web and
.NET emphasis with each new release of Visual Studio.  That's where
they see the money to be.  It seems to me that MS expects C++ to go
the way of FORTRAN and COBAL.  Still there, still used, but by an
increasingly small number of people for a small (but important!)
subset of things.  Note how MS still hasn't produced a C99 compiler.
They just don't see it as relevant to enough people to be financially
worthwhile.

Disclaimer -- these are all just my own personal opinions.

--bb