

Cω - latitude
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/cambridge/projects/comega/doc/comega_startpage.htm

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ratsbane
I wish they wouldn't use non-word characters in the names of their products. I
thought ".Net" was bad enough when it came out - then C# and F#. But I don't
even know how to type this. On this page: [http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/cambridge/projects/co...](http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/cambridge/projects/comega/doc/comega_whatis.htm) they refer to it as Cw,
Cω, and Comega. The artist formerly known as incomprehensible.

~~~
nandemo
Well, it's not a product.

"Cω is an experimental research language. There are no plans to turn it into a
commercial language supported by Microsoft. It is not supported by either the
C# or the Visual Studio teams. There are no plans to integrate it into any
product."

I guess people working in research enjoy the leeway of being able to name
their projects any way they want.

~~~
pbreit
Except the guy gave two other examples of impossible-to-search-for Microsoft-
given names: .net and c#.

~~~
coderdude
If you search for either of those terms in Google or Bing you find the
appropriate resources right away. People love to regurgitate that these names
are not searchable but somehow we've found a way. Cω isn't typeable, but
that's a different issue.

~~~
rtaycher
there are come problems with readable url's(ex stack overflow, questions with
c# in the title end up looking like questions about c).

~~~
coderdude
There are issues if the stubs you use in your URLs only allow a-z and 0-9. You
could just as easily escape each character in the stub and preserve the title
of the post/question you're representing. This is a problem with Stack
Overflow though, not the name of the language (C#).

Wikipedia has this issue solved. You can use any Unicode character in their
titles and they get used as the stub by escaping those characters. Anyway,
it's not like the whole world _only_ uses the English alphabet. This should be
handled properly.

~~~
robin_reala
C Sharp always seems to me that it should be spelled C♯, not C#. But then I’m
coming from a music background.

~~~
jtheory
Yes. The technical term for # is "octothorpe", so if we follow the "comega"
approach for C#, that gives us "coctothorpe", a very ...unpretty term.

Far better to type C♯. Or, if you're the one naming a new language, to look
for a better name.

~~~
robin_reala
It’s hard enough to persuade people to type curly quotes and proper accents
even when it’s easy to do (e.g. on OS X). Chances of them learning to type a
♯? Minimal.

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contextfree
People here seriously don't recognize the Greek letter omega? What kind of
geeks are you anyway?

Anyway, this project is long dead as far as I know, although much (but far
from all) of it was incorporated into C#.

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josephcooney
I loved Cw back in 2004. I even wrote an article on it
[http://jcooney.net/post/2004/10/06/OMG-Ccf89-is-
Awesome!-You...](http://jcooney.net/post/2004/10/06/OMG-Ccf89-is-Awesome!-You-
should-check-it-out.aspx) unfortunately after several blog and hosting
platform migrations it got lost. "retail" C# has mostly caught up on many of
the cool features of Cw.

~~~
CrazedGeek
The Internet Archive to the rescue!
[http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20060208140949/http://dotne...](http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20060208140949/http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/josephcooney/articles/27776.aspx)

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mmaunder
From wikipedia: [The symbol ω is used] in relational database theory to
represent NULL, a missing or inapplicable value.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega>

~~~
mturmon
I thought it was from this usage:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_uncountable_ordinal>

basically going as far as possible in the sequence C, C++, ...

~~~
cosbynator
Not to be too pedantic, but little omega is not the first uncountable ordinal
(it is countable by definition), it is the first infinite one.

~~~
mturmon
You know what, you're right (and if I may add, on both counts ;-).

The wikipedia page I referenced, loosely summarized, is referring to an
ordinal number with the cardinality aleph-1. The plain omega that I should
have referenced has cardinality aleph-0.

Unfortunately, the ordinal I wanted does not have its own wikipedia page. WTF?
Merely countable is not notable enough?

~~~
barista
Some research project about a new language and the top comments are about how
weird its name is and how the character looks like a butt? I'm speechless.

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larsberg
Much of this excellent research project has been "embraced & extended" into C#
at this point.

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mkramlich
Like my advice for any programming language I think they should show their
source for "Hello World" on the home page. Code snippets are worth a thousand
words. Yields a good quick thumbnail feel for the language.

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knowtheory
This is compelling for a variety of reasons, but they're the same reasons i
find Scala is compelling. But Scala has a syntax that is terser and less
bracket-y (so far as i have seen), and is further a long as a language.

I'm curious how they see themselves relative to the capabilities of languages
like Scala.

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Almaviva
So do you pronounce it C-butt or C-boobs?

~~~
te_chris
C-balls?

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smtf
I had to look it up: it's pronounced "cee omega" according to Wikipedia.

~~~
AgentConundrum
That's also evident from the URL: _comega_ _startpage.htm

~~~
cristoperb
I pronounced it co-mega in my head. But c-omega makes more sense.

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mikerg87
why is this even news? most of this appeared in production a LINQ

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JoelMcCracken
To me, the most interesting thing about these comments are that almost nobody
knows anything about greek nowadays. Honestly, people, you should at least
recognize this from your experience at Uni at some point...

~~~
198d
What's really the most interesting thing is that I don't think but a few
people have mentioned anything other than the name in their comments resulting
in a meaningless discussion about what could be something quite interesting.

~~~
JoelMcCracken
An even better point.

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6ren
This Cω/LINQ concept of unifying XML and object data access with SQL- and
XPath-like syntax is elegant and obvious (aka _intuitive_ ).

Does it get much usage?

Most XML access is delegated to tools these days, and SQL is so familiar (and
type-based access so unfamiliar), that it seems unlikely to make inroads on
either - nor offer substantial practical benefits. That is: no order-of-
magnitude benefit to overcome barriers to adoption.

Have you personally found LINQ beneficial? Has it been _widely_ adopted?
Why/why not, do you think?

~~~
contextfree
"LINQ to Objects" (i.e. the set of standard query operators, basically
map/filter/fold and sundries) is hugely beneficial and ubiquitous in the
recent codebases I've worked on. LINQ to SQL and similar IQueryable providers
can be useful and are used, but unfortunately still suffer from the fact that
querying is just one part of an ORM solution, and the state of ORMs in general
and Microsoft's in particular is still kind of a mess. I haven't seen huge
resistance to adopting them though - using some kind of LINQ-based ORM is
pretty standard in ASP.NET MVC projects.

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acoustica
My main concern for this language would be (not that using lower case omega in
conjuction with the letter C advertises looking at one's breasts or ass) that
there is no room for specifics. It says it takes all these great qualities and
generalizes them. Other than that, that brief overview makes it sound like
something worth looking into.

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jdp23
Here's the project's page ... it's an follow-on to Cedric Fournet et. al.'s
work on Polyphonic C# [http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/cambridge/projects/co...](http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/cambridge/projects/comega/)

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shadowfox
It is interesting that 16 hours after the post only 4 (or so) comments on this
page has anything to the language itself. The rest, including the highest
voted threads, are about the choice of the name :)

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lincolnq
Wow! The most interesting thing I found in this was the "chords" idea of
concurrent programming. Check it out. I've never seen anything like it -- has
this been thought about?

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tomrod
Will this be better than Python? I'm still a programming tinkerer so I don't
have enough knowledge to evaluate.

~~~
m0th87
Learning to program with a language as academic as this would be like learning
about the basics of electromagnetism by building a particle accelerator :)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>like learning about the basics of electromagnetism by building a particle
accelerator

I think you mean "using" and in which case I assume you're saying it would be
the only way to do it effectively but that the results might be hard to apply
in practice and no one else has managed to do it so far?

If you meant "building" then I'd have to say you meant "you wouldn't learn
anything as it's about applying knowledge, an engineering task, and not about
learning.

Perhaps I misunderstood, it's late and I have had a drink ...

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Sloven
How about speed? The Linq is to slow versus to sp call

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ramses0
Sorry for the juvenile humor here, but this looks like I would have to
pronounce it "C-nutz". Glad there are no release plans to send this into the
wild.

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comice
looks like a curvy penis and a pair of balls to me. read into that as you
will(y).

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nu2ycombinator
ω reminds me the symbol people usually use for 'ass' on internet chats. I
remember this language as C-ass. :)

