Speaker Profile: Ted Neward

Ted Neward is one of the most popular speakers on the Visual Studio Live! circuit. You can usually find him, when not speaking, holding court with several attendees talking coding languages or recounting his latest adventures behind a barbeque grill.

We recently caught up with Neward, who's also The Working Programmer columnist for MSDN Magazine, and had a chance to find out what makes him tick.

Neward's "speciality" is languages of all forms, and that dates back to when he was a C++ developer and first got a glimpse of Java. At first, he discounted it—it looked like a crippled C++. No templates, no default parameters, no operator overloading, who'd want to work with a crippled C++? But after six months of playing with Java 1.0 and 1.1 beta, he realized the beauty of Java lay not in the language, but the virtual machine living underneath it. That opened up a whole new dimension to programming languages, and he's been chasing those "shaft of light from heaven" moments around different languages ever since.

Looking forward, he thinks we're going to see a proliferation of Ahead-of-Time compilation tools (similar to what Xamarin does to allow using C# to build iOS apps). That seems to represent a really nice best-of-both-worlds compromise between traditional compiled languages (a la C++) and runtime-based languages (a la Java or the Microsoft .NET Framework). He suspects Visual Studio will start exploring this already, pushing more of the ".NET Native" story as people warm up to the idea.

If he were a lead product manager right now, here's what he'd do:

• For Visual Studio: Buy Xamarin.
• For SQL Server: Ensure that Ruby, NodeJS, and Python all have Microsoft-blessed SQL Server drivers for better/easier access to Microsoft databases, and start looking at tools like Neo4J, FoundationDB, and MongoDB and see how/where/when we want to start thinking about non-relational storage in the SQL Server environment.

When asked what keeps him challenged and engaged, he says, "Have you seen how many languages there are out there? And despite all their similarities, they often hide really interesting idioms, features, or approaches that influence how I build and write software. And the beautiful thing is that's never going to end. For as long as we write software, we will be looking for better ways to write software, and incorporate them into our languages."

When asked if he thought anything was missing in programming today, he said, "Not a thing. As I said, have you seen how many languages there are out there?"

Happy coding!

Posted by Lafe Low on 07/21/2015