I was emailing with a VS languages team member yesterday, and asked him why he wrote a piece of code a certain way (just some sample snippet that he used to illustrate an idea in the email thread). He responded that he normally codes day-to-day in C++, and generally distrusts the language, so he tries to be as explicit as possible. And that got me thinking about the concept of trustworthy languages. It seems like sometimes we're so focused on the addition features related to many other engineering aspects and goals, that we normally don't ask the question: "at the end of...

"C#, .NET, Visual Basic, FoxPro, COM." "What are Microsoft technologies that should have died by now?" It's really interesting how the development community, in light of being a community of engineers, is so enthralled and passionate about subjective analysis and fortune-telling. I recently ran into a few online conversations with some long-time friends that lead me to think back to around 2001 to 2003 - a time rife with predictions about Microsoft technologies - and how most of those predictions never quite panned out. After the J++ lawsuit debacle, Microsoft decided to take Sun head-on with a brand new (yet another) C-derived...