Letters from Readers
A sampling of letters from the developer community.
Visual Studio Adds F#
As Greg DeMichillie reports in his Directions column this issue, Microsoft has announced that it's adding support for the F# functional programming language to Visual Studio. Here's what readers have to say:
I'm very excited that Microsoft is including a functional programming language in Visual Studio. I loved working with Lisp, Scheme and ML in my computer science course, but honestly never expected to see them introduced into the corporate environment, so this is quite exciting. I look forward to F# being included.
Rod Falanga
Programmer Analyst 3,
University of New Mexico
Albuquerque, N.M.
I think Microsoft is "scaling up." For those of us with a little music background, going from C to F# is an upscale move, but a tougher key to play in. We may need a capo to make the transition.
Wayne Henegar
President and Owner,
Henegar Consulting Inc.
Mt. Carmel, Ill.
Security Matters
In this issue's Q&A, security expert Johannes Ullrich argues that software developers need to stay focused on security issues throughout the lifecycle. But not everyone agrees:
I'm a developer and I think security is important, but it shouldn't be implemented in the development of the application. The developer's main role is to develop applications that respond to a certain need: schedule printed documents for a company, display on a map data about population, income and so on. At the time of development, security context hasn't-along with a lot of other things-been thought through. The developer doesn't know in what context his application is going to run, so I think security should be implemented after the application has been developed.
Jean Michel Bissonnette
.NET Developer
Quebec City, Quebec, Canada