Microsoft says 'D' language better than 'C' variants

Microsoft is working on a new development language, called 'D,' which will make it easier to model applications, Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet reports.

Her post describes D as a "declarative language aimed at non-developers."

Modeling and end-user programming are big themes in Microsoft's development tools work.

By creating models of applications, developers can speed up their development time and make it easier to deploy and operate those applications once they are live.

End-user programming, a long-held idea, is getting more realistic in the days of mashups where people combine data from different Web feeds onto a single Web page.

Last year, Microsoft's developer group released Popfly which is a mash-up builder. It's a visual application creation tool, but it's also meant to introduce basic concepts of programming.

[tompittman7]

Test based and not visual?

I totally agree something like this is necessary -- and perhaps long overdue, but I'm a bit surprised this modeling platform (if I understand it correctly) is text based and not visual.

The old CASE tools of the 80s were too cumbersome and expensive to fill this need, but computing has come a long way since then. If there is a better way to do this, now is the time to be looking at the problem again.

[rd1rd2]

In response to your surprise about this text based language:

It is a complete fiction that visual languages are more intuitive and more understandable.

How many tecchnical books have you read recently written mostly in a visual language?

The history of written language is clear - it began with pictures designed to convey things, then evolved a simple grammar so that sequences of images had a generally understood meaning, slowly becoming more and more structured and less and less visual. Eventually we reached an efficient way of communicating in written form, such as the letters that I am now typing. This happened for good reasons - it is far easier to make yourself understood in a language with a well structured grammar than with pictures.

To suggest that we should use visual languages now to communicate programs to computers to me is like saying we need we need to go back to pre-Ancient Egypt in order to know how languages should be. I do not agree with this. To express complicated things, it is clear that text has won out in natural language, and I personally cannot imagine that visual computer languages will ever achive more than the ancient visual written languages that we left behind thousands of years ago.

[Astinsan]

Better? There are a lot of languages out there..

I don't know how they can say anything is better than something else. Wasn't Vista supposed to be "Better".

I say learn any language you want. Then adopt others. Its better to base your knowledge on many and pick one to specialize in.

[TheCyberShadow]

D already exists

Even if Microsoft is going to push forward yet another language to promote their platforms/development tools, I hope they pick another name. The Digital Mars D language ( http://www.digitalmars.com/d/ ) has existed for quite some time now, and is quickly gaining popularity as a better C++.

[drhowarddrfine]

Can't MS even innovate a name?

I had been reading about D for quite a while now. I'm surprised CNET didn't pick up on this because I'm confused whether MS is picking up on the real D langauge or creating their own but stealing the name.

[xhable]

can't call it D

As already mentioned there is already a D programming language. Indeed almost all the letters of the alphaet have been claimed. Only i,m,n,o,p,u,v,w,x remain. Looks like microsoft has some slim pickings for naming choices.

Also I think the title of this post is a little confusing. Better, better how? perhaps it's better for those with one leg and green skin, better implies better in all circumstances. I doubt highly they will create something as efficient as C.