I hate to write a "me too" article, especially on a topic that made it all the way to Slashdot, but there is a time for all things, and this appears to be such a time. 

Microsoft has been the dictator of software for a long time, and I've bemoaned this situation as they have hardly been benevolent.  At the same time, to deny the good works of anyone is to deny the good works of all, and it's in that spirit that I need to take the time and offer a round of applause to Microsoft and in particular to Anders Hejlsberg and his team who appear to be doing some very good work (better detail here) for .net, C# and the whole Microsoft "family" of languages. 

There is little doubt that adding type inference, lambda expressions, anonymous types, extension expressions, and the new SQLish language extensions to .net will go far to simplify and speed up the work of the many developers using these tools.  It may also force other languages (notably Java) to pick up the pace of improvement (which has been glacial frankly).  

Is this innovation?  Academically perhaps not, but in the world of "mainstream" languages this is a huge leap forward.  Anders helped revolutionize GUI building with the first Delphi release, and this follows that tradition.  No doubt it will also tip the balance dramatically towards C# as the language of choice, and there is real danger in that tipping, but I believe in progress as a good in itself and so I must applaud and do so loudly.  Of course there is that final step of having these features in the product and having them work well.  Some people will be secretly hoping this does not take place (and I have seen many of these amongst the various posters around the net), as for me I hope it comes out even better than it looks on paper.