SOFTWARE BEHEMOTH Microsoft has lifted the kimono on a prototype of an experimental programming language for creating interactive infographics, data visualizations and computational art.
Dubbed "Vedea" after a river in Romania, the language has come out of the Volish research labs in Cambridge, here in Blighty.
The idea is to simplify coding so developers can focus on more important things such as Beer Pong and working out new ways to get chocolate from the vending machine without paying for it.
Users of Vedea obviously need to have some background in coding, so writing lines like "10 PRINT 'Hi'" and "20 GOTO 10" is not really going to cut it.
According to Link Removed due to 404 Error, the motivation for building Vedea is to give the user a way to visualise the results.
The Microsoft Visualization Language is built on the new .NET 4.0 Dynamic Language Runtime. Syntactically, it looks a lot like simple C# but there are no class decorations, just a collection of functions. Classes can be added for object-oriented programming, but they are not required.
The language is dynamically typed. Variables take on the type of whatever is assigned to them. You don't have to declare variables at all, they are defined the first time they appear on the left side of an assignment statement. µ
Microsoft invents a new language - The Inquirer
Dubbed "Vedea" after a river in Romania, the language has come out of the Volish research labs in Cambridge, here in Blighty.
The idea is to simplify coding so developers can focus on more important things such as Beer Pong and working out new ways to get chocolate from the vending machine without paying for it.
Users of Vedea obviously need to have some background in coding, so writing lines like "10 PRINT 'Hi'" and "20 GOTO 10" is not really going to cut it.
According to Link Removed due to 404 Error, the motivation for building Vedea is to give the user a way to visualise the results.
The Microsoft Visualization Language is built on the new .NET 4.0 Dynamic Language Runtime. Syntactically, it looks a lot like simple C# but there are no class decorations, just a collection of functions. Classes can be added for object-oriented programming, but they are not required.
The language is dynamically typed. Variables take on the type of whatever is assigned to them. You don't have to declare variables at all, they are defined the first time they appear on the left side of an assignment statement. µ
Microsoft invents a new language - The Inquirer
