Top 10 Wiki Ninjas - Nevin Janzen & the Microsoft Axum programming language (formerly Maestro)

Welcome to our weekly Top 10 Contributors on TechNet Wiki!

Today's winner is new to TechNet (he just joined on January 5th)...

Nevin Jansen

Well, first, Nevin has an interesing profile picture:

In Nevin's words: "I have been working with computers since I was 3, but I had my first computer when I was about 6 or 7. I started to use HTML and JavaScript when I was 8/9/10 (can't remember) and then I moved up to C# 4.0 (in VS 2010) in an enormous leap when I was 12 (don't ask me why, because I don't know exactly). I now know C# almost as good as I know the back if my hand, or "enough to be dangerous" as my dad would say. I then started to learn VB.NET and then realized that it was so similar to C# (except for a few differences, keywords, operators, and a few other things) so I turned my full attention to C# and decided to learn it fully. I prefer languages of the C-Family kind. These past few months I learned native C++ and am now creating DLLs with it. I am very excited about C# 5.0, Visual Studio 11, Windows 8, .NET Framework 4.5, and C++11."

Nevin, you're 14 years old? Nevin works at Cobra Programming. (Well, Benjamin Franklin was 12 when he started working at his brother's print shop and 15 when he started writing the Silence Dogood letters.)

Nevin has authored two articles so far, which are about the cutting-edge Axiom programming language (both are the same, but one's in Spanish):

Click the article above (English or Spanish) to get the full story on Axium. Here's the quick overview:

Axum is a new programming language that builds upon the architecture of the Web and principles of isolation, actors, and message-passing to increase application safety, responsiveness, scalability, and developer productivity. Other advanced concepts the Axum team are exploring are data flow networks, asynchronous methods, and type annotations for taming side-effects. Axum shares syntax similarities with C#, C++, and C; but most closely C#. Axum can be used with other .NET languages, and it can call methods, use types, do processes, etcetera with your own .NET Framework projects. Axum' foundation is the .NET framework and the CLR.

For those who don't know, Axum was discontinued, but you can still check it out and play with it. And, best of all, it was a success, and several of the concepts it experimented with are being integrated into the .NET and C# languages (see the article above for more info).

You can track Nevin's current and future authored articles here.

But surely those two articles didn't get Nevin up to 126 edits this week. So what did?

Well, he's mostly been adding tags to articles, which is very cool and very much needed. And please be sure to check out the great detail on his Axum articles so that you know the level of quality he produces. So thank you to Nevin, and please continue to contribute!

I received this nice comment on my .NET Framework article:

Nevin Janzen, Tue, Jan 10 2012 6:21 PM

"Fantastic article!"

 

That was one of the many articles he added tags to.

And of course congratulations to Ed Price/me (blog post), Tom Shinder (blog post), Fernando (interview, top 10 feature), Pantelis, Tejas, Steef-Jan Wiggers (interview, blog post), Carla, Mikail, and Heslacher.

Jump on in! The Wiki is warm! 

   - Ninja Ed (Blog, Twitter, Wiki, Profile)