Dminor - Microsoft Research's data-modeling language | Hacker News Reader

Dminor - Microsoft Research's data-modeling language

research.microsoft.com

17 pointslt15 comments

For reference, since the documentation and paper on this language are inexplicably not linked anywhere on the MS website:

Research paper describing a preliminary version of Dminor: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/adg/minim.html

The readme.html from inside the archive, with a basic overview of the language and some samples: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1643240/dminor_readme.html

Please note that the readme is made available under the terms of the license that applies to the rest of the package. IANAL but reposting the readme seemed acceptable based on my reading of the license. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/cd60cdb0-353f-...

I've always been a bit confused on topics related to MSR. Everyone seems to hate Microsoft, for their products, for their policies, for pretty much everything. Although I've been noticing that its going down. But still Microsoft Research happens to be the most respected research group. And thats in my very humble opinion. (I'm just completing my undergraduation.) The kind of people who join MSR, the kind of work that they do, the kind of groups (in academia) that they are associated with - everything happens to be top notch. Still there are so many people who are anti-MS. Confuses me everytime.

Ma Bell and Bell Labs had the same issue. It's definitely surprising but nothing new.

My perception is that MSR has the same flaw as Bell Labs once did ... they keep coming with cool ideas that aren't getting productized (of course, I'm too young to have an opinion here :))

Anyway, on the programming languages front, Microsoft is releasing some pretty cool stuff and they should get some credit for that, regardless of their history.

ClearType, F#, Surface and Songsmith are all productized MSR projects.

But isn't that quite often true of research outfits in large companies? Certainly the success of UNIX was not due to the internal productization efforts of AT&T, nor Smalltalk of Parc, and so on. The point to research is somewhat parallel to investing in startups--you fund many tens of ideas, and some take off with a life of their own, and others don't.

Is it named D Minor to imply it is in harmony with C#?

That and probably as a pun on the D language. I'm sure Walter Bright just LOVES the name. /s

If so, it's wrong. Those two keys would clash - their tonics are only a half step apart. The relative minor for C#(major) would be A#m. You find that by calling C# "1" and counting up the musical scale to 6.

In the harmonic D Minor, the C is raised to C#.

Or perhaps they're paying tribute to me!

Pun on data miner?

research.microsoft.com has been unreachable from Budapest for months.

No documentation?

goog is on a buying spree msft on a language release spree!

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