Still Scratching The Surface

I was pleased to learn earlier today that Scott Wiltamuth, one of the designers of C#, has started blogging. I'm looking forward to seeing what Scott has to say about the past, present, and future of language design for .NET.

I first encountered Scott the day I did my internship interview, over ten years ago. Bob Allison and Osh Momoh from the Visual Basic team came by Needles Hall on the University of Waterloo campus to conduct interviews. If I recall correctly, Bob was wearing bicycle shorts and a product T-shirt, which was my first clue that things were somewhat more relaxed at Microsoft than at the bank I had interviewed with earlier that day. Osh gave me some slickly produced recruiting material with pictures and quotes of real-life Microsoft employees.

Amongst those pictures was one of Scott Wiltamuth, then also on the VB team, with a line that was something like "Have we done all the cool language features already? No, we've hardly scratched the surface! " Scott became known as the "VB Poster Child" for that one, and took a lot of good-natured ribbing over the years for it.

But he was right then, and he's still right. There's lots more cool stuff to do in languages and developer tools. We're just getting started here!