I can't substantiate this, but my sense is that the generation of general-purpose, non-academic programming languages C++ lowered the barrier to writing software in the industrial context (think VB.Net, etc.). This can be seen as a good thing in these business contexts, but for those who are driven to be deeper and more concise in their problem solving, and are interested in solving more challenging problems, are only starting to realize that we've not been expecting enough out of our languages and compilers. Furthermore, the last two decades of software tool development have gained "lowest common denominator" accessibility at the cost of "dumbing down" the ways we generalists think about and solve problems. The first thing that picking up Scala did for me was realize I was expecting way too little from the compilers I use. Why should I be figuring out what the damn type of a value should be (while not throwing out types all together)!?!Since Meijer is as an employee of Microsoft I'd extrapolate to say he's heavily influenced in his experience of the "average programmer" by the primary clients of his company.
endeavour|12 years ago