Programmers in the real world wrestle every day to overcome the impedance mismatch between relational data, objects, and XML. For the past ten years we have been working on solving this problem by applying principles from functional programming, in particular monads and comprehensions.

By viewing data as monads and formulating queries as comprehensions, it becomes possible to unify the three data models and their corresponding programming languages instead of considering each as a separate special case.

To bring these theoretical ideas within the reach of mainstream programmers, we have worked tirelessly on transferring functional programming technology from pure Haskell, via Comega to the upcoming versions of C# 3.0 and Visual Basic 9 and the LINQ framework.

Functional programming has finally reached the masses, except that it is called Visual Basic instead of Lisp, ML, or Haskell!