I couldn’t agree more. Since the release of C# 1.0, there’s been quite a few people wanting to see the abilitity to take part of the compilation steps and modify the code before it is committed to the assembly.

At PDC, Anders Hejlsberg talked about how opening up the compiler to this would devolve the language. This is were they go wrong. It is not a question about modifying the language, rather than introducing a framework that extends the language to solve domain specific tasks or common problems to make the code more readable and expressive.

For one to call a programming language general purpose, I think one need to open up for this kind of extensibility, otherwize it really can’t be general purpose. We are leaning more and more to other ways of expressing the the code we want through DSLs and frameworks. It kind of feels unnatural.

At PDC on the future of programming languages panel debate, they talked about that syntax matters, it shouldn’t, but it does. When one claims this, I find it really strange that Microsoft is so focused on creating a bunch of DSLs for solving the problems instead of opening their “main” language (C#) to be able to express it in a more natural way.