Microsoft's New "M" Programming Language

In a software-centric world where there are already have many, many languages to program in, from scripting to bytecode compiled languages, to frameworks on top of languages and embedded languages, now Redmond wants to bring another language to the table, titled ‘M’.

The new language is to be a part of Microsoft’s new Oslo development and service-oriented strategy, incorporating features from XAML while being textual and domain-specific. M is to be used directly with 2 other components to be released with M along with Visual Studio 2010: Quadrant, a tool for building models visually, and a repository for storing and viewing models in an SQL database.

Microsoft has not said much other than that about the new language, but it will presumably be a compiled .Net language, and from what Microsoft said, M is to strive to be cross-platform…. with a catch.

By “cross platform”, Microsoft means, “cross platform as long the other platform authors write a backend for the code, and the SQL database MUST be hosted on MS SQL, a proprietary Microsoft Windows service”. It makes perfect sense for being cross platform, if you are Microsoft and trying to purchase many copies of Windows (therefore generating revenue, and presumably the version is Vista or win2k8 since XP is out).

Another source says the language is actually their ‘D’ language (and no, Microsoft did not originally invent D either), only revamped to fit into their new Oslo modeling strategy and renamed to a further letter down the alphabet to attract new interest in an old product.

The fundamentals and principals of the language are attractive, especially for OOP, but its ties to MS SQL and .net would only really make it attractive to Windows-specific applications, although its integration with ASP.net is unclear at this point.

The mono project does a descent job of allowing .net code to run on non-windows platforms, and if M adheres to the same standards then after a given time M-written applications will be penguin-friendly as well if Microsoft can get around the MS SQL dependency.