Big Thinkers – Ted Neward

I’m devoting this week to “Big Thinkers”. I want to highlight individuals who challenge my thought processes and cause me to think about my profession, my methodologies, and force me to reflect on my skills. Some of these individuals I have the privilege of knowing personally, others I have only known via Podcasts or Twitter. I’m hoping that by highlighting these Big Thinkers you too will be challenged to grow and evolve in your craft.

It’s hard to believe anyone would not know who Ted Neward is. I had the pleasure of meeting him at DevLink 2008, then saw him again at the 2009 MVP summit where we had several enjoyable conversations. Ted is truly a renaissance man when it comes to languages. He is best known for his skills in Java and .Net, and more recently F#, but his love for programming languages seems boundless. It’s not about knowing a language though, it’s about understanding how each language solves programming problems. For example, how does language A handle variables versus language B? What advantages or disadvantages does that approach give language A over B?

By attempting to understand how a language solves problems, we can take those techniques and apply them in other languages. F# is a great example, it is a language from Microsoft Research that is functional rather than object based. Recently though I have seen several articles on how to implement functional methods in C#, traditionally an object based language.

Ted has been on Dot Net Rocks probably more times than anyone one else, as well as it’s sister video podcast DNRTV. One of my favorite episodes was a little over a year ago, “Ted Neward on the New Language Renaissance”. Very recently he was on Code Cast, in Episode 21 he was talking about .Net and Java and how Oracles buy out of Sun affects the industry.

The most memorable podcast I have seen him in was an interview he did on F#. I was on my way to DevLink 2008, got about half way there when my poor old truck broke down. As I sat waiting in a local Taco Bell for rescue, I pulled out my laptop and watched some videos I’d downloaded including Ted’s F# interview. If you notice in the video, Ted is wearing a rather snazzy “I Love C#” t-shirt. The next day I get back on the road and once again strike out for DevLink arriving just in time for the last session of the day, a session on F# with Ted and Amanda Laucher. I was quite thrown to see Ted wearing the exact same shirt. I had to pinch myself to ensure I had not fallen asleep in the Taco Bell!

Hopefully Ted’s love of languages, his passion to learn different ways to solve problems will wear off on you too. And who knows, with his new found fame and fortune perhaps he can afford a second t-shirt!