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De Icaza Responds on Mono and GNOME
miguel writes: "Here is my reply to the various questions on Mono, the future of GNOME and the Register statements." Linux Today has a copy of the email as well.
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GNOME had always tried to have a good support for multiple programming languages, because we realize that no matter how much we loved C as a programming language, there was a large crowd of people out there that would like to use the GNOME libraries fromtheir favorite programming language, which might not necessarily be C.
This is the reason having Mono at the heart of Gnome would be a good idea. Base it on the CLI and suddenly any language that is ".Net-enabled" is usable under Gnome.
It's about choice. Isn't that what Open Source is all about?
This are better news and a much needed clarification.
Miguel surely understands (if he didn't he wouldn't clarify it like this) that although he (or ximian) don't own GNOME, they have a major steering strength on its development.
Sometimes that counts for a lot, and is what surely led to everyone's confusion (specially the news agents) on this subject.
Thank you Miguel, I feel _very_ less stressed out about this.
Best wishes, Cyke
Wrong. Programmer's lives are exciting, as long as you like Computer Science and enjoy tweaking with the little bits, discovering new things. Now, if Miguel started writing Unix software thinking he would be rich, surrounded by girls and driving Romero's Ferrari, he's far beyond dumbness.
I think Icaza is making a mistake; It doesn't matter if .NET or whatever is a great technology, open source developers need to be able to be _proud_ of their work.
How could we be proud of something that is merely (aiming to be) a copy of something MS has developed? Granted, our desktop environments are largely copying MS functionality, but at least we can pick the bits we like and create new things when we want to.
Can you hear me, Major Tom? I'm not the man they think I am at home...
Miguel has made many positive arguments for his prior statments. And thanks to the Register for obfuscating the variables.
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
*ducks*
Best Slashdot Co
Thanks to Miguel, and a big lemon for the Register for their misleading headline. I guess the search for the "next big scoop" has gotten the better of them this time.
This is all really interesting news...though we should still keep stressing the difference between the ".NET framework" and Microsoft's proposed ".NET services"!
Reminder: find a new sig
> Miguel wrote:
..., iff the (.NET) CIL is sooooo powerful.
> The CIL has one feature not found in Java though: it is
> byte code representation that is powerful enough to be used as a
> target for many languages: from C++, C, Fortran and Eiffel to Lisp
> and Haskell including things like Java, C#, JavaScript and Visual
> Basic in the mix.
Bullshit. See here for JVM languages.
Furthermore care to explain the existance of "managed" C, Perl,
See here [tu-berlin.de] for JVM languages
Nice list of languages *re-implemented* in Java. No indication on that page of any of those languages being compiled into Java bytecode and being run as if they were Java.
At the very least Miguel is guilty of misjudgement. He is trying to do whatever possible to sell Mono, even to bet the future of GNOME on it. Since Mono will take a number of years to be usable for GNOME (if that ever happens), why tie GNOME to Mono now? Mono is of no use to GNOME for the next release (and the next release), why distract the community with such "vaporware" comments? No good comes out of selling Mono now to the GNOME community who is working on the next release based in C.
One thing though. Miguel says:
This just strikes me as overly hopeful optimism to think that Microsoft is going to give up their hard fought and long defeneded applications barrier to entry.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
Previewing AND submitting takes just a few secs and it always works!
Miguel:
> or ourselves. I want to be as compatible as
> possible with the APIs that were published by
> Microsoft.
Alan:
Be assured that the day they decide you are a nuisance the VM will acquire a patented neat feature that kills you off. Just ask the Samba people.
(from Alan's reply to Miguel's message)
Could someone please play this email backwards, I'm afraid I'll be brainwashed into a Microsoft slut by the time I'm done reading it.
Over and over again, Miguel De Icaza has displayed the same sort of breathless excitement over Microsoft technologies that I'd expect to see from a newbie, not a developer of his caliber. It's extraordinarily short-sighted for him to believe that he'll be able to keep up with Microsoft. This isn't a matter of talent. Microsoft has shown, time and time again, that it has no problem locking out other vendors using API changes and whatever other means available.
Miguel seems to be ignoring the fact that Microsoft will very likely do everything it can to keep Mono uselessly lagging. They've embraced and extended every technology they've adopted, and even their own APIs shift constantly. I realize that the .NET Framework looks like a different approach, and Microsoft is acting like it's going to start playing nice. If it happens, it'd be a first for Microsoft. I personally have my doubts, and history backs me up. What a shame that a talented developer like Miguel doesn't know better than to trust them.
-zack
There is a point in your life when you realize that you have written enough destructors, and have spent enough time tracking down a memory leak, and you have spend enough time tracking down memory corruption, and you have spent enough time using low-level insecure functions, and you have implemented way too many linked lists [1]
Last time I felt that way, I dicovered Lisp. Java also fits the bill (and so does C++ with STL, BOOST and ACE.
Good article on this appeared today:
.NET SDK, the cross-language support looks impressive, but the illusion holds true only until realizing that all languages in the mix are virtually identical. Microsoft has actually invented the concept of skinnable language: changing a language's most superficial aspects, and claiming the result to be a new language. There is only One True Language that is C#, and "skins" offered by Microsoft and third parties. Just like in GUIs, these skins will alter the system's look and feel, add a few features, but never compete with a fully new toolkit.
One Runtime to Bind Them All
Some quotes:
The reality looks much darker instead. The CLR is not truly language-neutral, and it will ostensibly favor languages that look a lot like C#. Those not in this group will be severely bastardized, producing dialects which are really "C# with another syntax"; look at ISE's Eiffel# (or even Microsoft's own VB.NET and J#) for great examples. Programmers' choice will be limited to superficial features: whether to delimit their blocks with curly braces, Begin/End or parentheses. It's also worth notice that the CTS/CTS do not allow use of the full set of CLR features; for example, unsigned integers are supported by the CLR but not considered language-neutral, simply because many languages share Java's abomination for the signed/unsigned duality (this includes Microsoft's own VB) and there's no good solution for this issue.
-cut-
Playing with the
...convert Linux to a standard compatible desktop OS for evryone?, mmm... geeks will need a new hideout to hang and talk about bytes in hex language. Seriously, the singularity of Linux plus the community was great.
Sigs are for morons... Wait a minute...
* GNOME is not built by an individual, its built by a team of roughly 500 contributors in many areas.
* Decisions in the GNOME world are done by active contributors and module maintainers. I have given my maintainership status on every module I maintained to other members of the GNOME team as I got more involved with Ximian and later on with Mono.
So effectively I have no "maintainer" control.
Is it rude to say 'I told you so'?
~~ What's stopping you?
> Some people wonder if we have got a Microsoft investment or ;-) Man, I wonder what that would be like!
> contract (because I like this Microsoft technology). The answer
> is no. But I would take one if they wanted to fund my free
> software project
- Like being eaten alive by rabid hyenas
- Like being locked in a room where no one can hear you scream
- Like eating arsenic on your breakfast cereal
Or maybe it wouldn't be as good as all that.
Looking for a Rails developer in Chapel Hill?
The point is, just like the JVM, the CLR can run any language as long as the language is re-designed to run with the CLR. The Common-Language part of CLR is basically marketing BS.
...that The Register is nothing more than the IT version of a British tabloid.
Seasoned industry programmers will notice that the above is very much like Java and the Java VM. They are right, the above is just like Java.
The CIL has one feature not found in Java though: it is byte code representation that is powerful enough to be used as a target for many languages: from C++, C, Fortran and Eiffel to Lisp and Haskell including things like Java, C#, JavaScript and Visual Basic in the mix.
But this is surely misleading? It's true that this doesn't exist at present, but there's nothing in theory to stop it being implemented (isn't Java sufficiently "powerful" for this to be done?)
If Java is capable of doing it, then why not work on making compilers for those languages to Java's bytecode instead of working with a new language?
Strange, I'd thought that some friends of mine were still using it.
What is Alan going on about here? I must be reading the wrong news sites.
Kevin
me? i've helped put linux on the desktop of tens of thousands of customers sites.
not using a bloated piece of shit hard to write code for msft whoring piece of shit.
thank you.
now, are you perhaps projecting about watching springer and sitting on a couch you wanker.
The CLR does support some feature that the JVM does not (notably, pointers). However, it is not true to suggest that it supports multiple languages in a way that the JVM does not. Languages have to be re-designed to run within the CLR-- you can't run "real" C or Perl or Java on the CLR.
De Icaza's point about their api's is very accurate. MS has gone through extraordinary efforts to keep their api's backward-compatable. They may indeed "shift" focus, but that exercise is only additive. The api's that Mono is implementing from the ".NET" spec are guaranteed to exist on microsoft's platform.
The situation with lagging behind is most likely unavoidable. But atleast one has the option of developing software using the published apis, and having the thing run on unix and windows.
My $0.02
As long as you have a CLR on your target machine, this is the way it works.
..., or...) and running it in a virtual machine somewhere else?
This is the way Java works already. Any compiled class written in Java can run in any environment with a JVM. So what's so surprising about taking a CIL-compiled class from C# (or VB.Net, or managed C++, or
(The first thing that struck me when I heard of this was that "Oh, man, this must be slow." The first thing that struck me when I first ran it was that "Oh, wow, it's not.")
That doesn't help much. If it has patented yet unlicensed technology, then it can't be legally used in countries where the patent is recognized.
This is why free crypto software for a long time had an internal-RSA vs. external-RSAREF configuration switch for a long time, with the stipulation that RSAREF had to be used within the U.S.---as using internal RSA would leave you open to an infringement suit. (RSAREF was the only freely licensed implementation of RSA available, before the patent expired last year)
iSKUNK!
So what is Microsoft aiming for? Probably two things:
- Kill Java. They need to kill it before it becomes too wide-spread. They have a really good shot at doing so given Java's performance problems [insert thousands of flames from Java developers here] and C#'s advanced features like better encapsulation (you don't need to call set() and get() methods, you can map them to the = operator, for example).
- "Write once, run on Microsoft". In order to run .NET apps on another platform you would have to virtually re-implement (or substitute) the entire Win32 API, which will probably be modified at an ever-increasing pace. No company can keep up -- only open source may be able to do that, but Microsoft's opinion might be that open source is no real threat for the platforms where they want to deploy .NET. (After all, even the average Slashdotter seems to think that Linux will never be ready for the desktop -- quite idiotic, IMHO, but the more people believe that, the better.)
Insofar Ximian's Mono project may be a good thing as it offers a migration path where previously none existed (from Windows to Linux), even if .NET apps don't run properly on Mono (think about all the GUI stuff that can go wrong, for example). Besides, Java has never really been a mature technology IMHO and it's about time to replace it with something better, even if superficially less cross-platform.
Now the advantages of having a modular architecture become clear. Mono cannot break Linux, it cannot break X, it can probably not even break GNOME. There are more alternatives than you can throw a kernel image at if something goes wrong. Let's just wait and see what the Mono guys come up with. The only people who should worry about this are Sun and their followers. And maybe RMS.
Dude, what's wrong with you? The rest of us are swimming in chicks, piles of cash and fast cars! You must be doing something wrong! As long as you follow the instruction book they send you when you start an open source project, all this can be yours. It outlines in clear steps exactly what you need to do to make your fortune using Open Source software, and it always works! Didn't you get yours yet?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I for one think the back and forth between Miguel and Alan is one of the most interesting things I've read through slashdot for some time.
all the benefits i see are easily attainable by technologies alreday in the field and not controlled by Microsoft......
Come back now, ya hear.
and history with M$ and this kind of stuff is long and basically the same....YOU ARE FSCKED !!!
but yes they have changed, things are diffrent. they now write secure, robust, stable, documented, attainable API's and programming languages...OKAY !!!
I felt M$'s paradigm shift, i thought it was an earthquake.
Thankfully, Gnome is dead, Gnome 2 is 2 years late and may yet not see the light of day. I guess things aere not so bad afterall.
were you expecting to see a sig here? perhaps you'd rather see the inside of an ambulance!
Congrats, Corporal!
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
Nice call broody.
:+)
Happy?
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
So, If I decided to stand beside Miguel and code for
GNOME in C#, where should I start?
The C# literature out there is too "in 21 days" for
an experienced programmer. What solid books are there
for the platform?
Miguel's arguments sound all well and good, but I think he is fundamentally naive about Microsoft.
.NET framework are still vague. Now, why might that be? The naive might think it's because Microsoft still haven't worked some of the details out. As has been stated many times before, Microsoft is betting the farm on .NET. Microsoft are a very competitive company, with one of the most lucrative monopolies in the world. Think about that. Imagine how Microsoft will respond if they start to loose market share, or control over developers, because of Mono.
.NET! That's because it's great technology and these days we're such nice people." But as soon as they feel it's a threat, well...
Microsoft have fought tooth and nail over many years to build their monopoly. They will do whatever it takes to protect that, within the boundries of what they can get away with these days.
Some parts of the
As long as Mono stays a little project (which it is as far as Microsoft is concerned) then they will play nice. They will be able to point to it and say "Hey, look, even the Open Source people are supporting
Don't be naive Miguel. You are implementing a copy of a system still under development the world's largest and most aggressive software monopoly. Think about that.
I particularly liked his comment about Linux coming from AT&T's non-free environment. He seems to imply that the .NET framework is to the future what AT&T UNIX is to the present.
> They have incorporated many ideas from Java, and they have extended it to address new needs that developers had. They took where Java left off.
ROFL. Well, there you have it! An endorsement for 'embrace and extend'. We all know about MS's attempts to do it with Java, so I guess thats what C# is. Java, embraced, extended. Kinda like when the CIA was caught doing something bad, they lopped off the bad department, christened it unaffiliated with the CIA, and thus, we have the NED. But I digress. Anyhow, I just found it interesting just how upfront and accepted this approach is now.
"Old man yells at systemd"
I have two things I would like to point out to you. Actually after preview it's alot of things.
.NET Framework stands on it's own feet, and developers in the Windows world love it....... We are witnessing the creating and deployment of a new standard...
So when you copy your binary from Windows that was compiled with the Visual Studio.NET and run it on your Unix platform, it will just integrate nicely with your GNOME desktop.
How exactly do you plan on doing that, as I'm aware of, at least right now. Microsoft hasn't submitted a full spec to the ECMA. Again; I will mention that Microsoft has never done something like this in the past; they've always blocked people out.
Your ideas on writing pieces of code in different languages is agreeable except in this case. Writing chunks of programs or pieces of code vital to the overall program in a different language which may or may not work to spec is just asking for trouble. (IE: using asm for sound routines etc etc many examples)
The
A standard that we will have to fight to operate with in the long run. Instead of unix camp supporting those ideals we should be supporting things like java or creating or own stuff. Just because windows developers love it doesn't mean it's not java with a couple of addons. If it was wildly different in any manner I would agree that we should be looking to use it; however this is not the case. A standard already exists and that standard is java
The only restriction is that all of our work has to be free software. But other than that, I am ready to take money from anyone or listen to any kind of proposals for making this happen
We all know nothing involving money comes without a price. Don't blind yourself to that. If someone gives you money, they want something. For Microsoft it'd be whatever it took to end the free software movement; period. Try not to be a pawn in their game, try not to play the game period.
Your comment that follows above italicized voids most of what you said earlier regarding inteoperability.
I sincerely think that you need to assess what your true goal is. This isn't nirvana, this isn't a place where you can walk into the middle of the street and not get hit by a car. This is a cruel world, I fear your intentions are good and your heart and mindset is in the right place but don't be fooled, Microsoft and others make this a very cruel industry. There are certain things that you can and can't do and currently they set the rules, this is what we are trying to break so that we don't have to worry about if a standard is submitted and we base our code on said standard that it will work across the board. Building upon their standards which do nothing to help that only helps them.
Thanks for your clarification it did clear up a couple of points though.
There are already Java bytecode compilers for both Eiffel and Smalltalk.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
I believe Microsoft actually obtained a software patent on at least one of the password hashing algorithms used in NT. If Microsoft ever pursued enforcement of that patent, anything that generated hashed passwords for use in the Samba password file could be at risk.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
when this comes to its only possible conclusion: microsoft silently encourages this effort until lots of gnome folks understand how to write c# and write to the .net fwk apis - then they will crush mono/open source .net; they'll kill you with licensing and incompatibility; they'll take you to court and screw you silly.
.net fwk class libraries - what do you think those folks will do? learn something else, or put those skills to work - often for money - on windows.
and then you'll have a huge group of people that like coding c# using the
and i will laugh my ass off at you idiots.
Does anybody hear anything in his name? I am talking about Icarus, the story here seem quite the same.
1) I thought Miguel's arguments for why he's getting behind the .NET Framework(the CLI and CLR to be specific) were excellent. I have read much about the Mono project since the announcement of its inception, but this is by far the best explication I have seen. If he hasn't made me a believer, he has at least made me very curious.
.NET to me seem like the obvious directions(licensing as a standard to ECMA, support for multiple languages, etc.) that Java should be going towards, but, for whatever reason, is not. I think .NET(and Mono) if they pick up steam will give sun the kick in the ass they need to get moving on some of this stuff that they are not.
2) As an active Java developer, I think that this may very well be the BEST thing someone could do to help Java. The directions Microsoft are going in with
I personally think the main reason Sun has not further opened Java up is because they have not perceived the need to. They are doing some calculus in their head to make it as open as they need to gain developers from Redmond, but still try to hold onto as much as possible of it for themselves.
3) My largest concern with this, and I didn't notice Miguel addressing it there or in the followups, is the patent issue. My worst fear is everything would go incredibly well with mono: diverse compilers, robust libraries, etc. and we would all start to build code around it, and then about 5 years down the line Microsoft whips out a patent and demands royalties for all the labor that we have done under the illusion that it would be free.
I would love to see Miguel address this concern. I cannot speak for others, but I would be a long way to considering getting involved with Mono(whether it mean using their tools to develop, or even contributing to the developmen of libraries, languages, etc.) if I felt better about these things.
Sorry, even though Miguel does a good job of going into an indepth "answer", Alan Cox takes all the air out of the sail.
Java is NOT broken or lacking because it is inferior. If it is lacking anything, it is because no one has gone the one step further and fixed it. Do THAT instead of rebuilding from M$-poopie.
Finally, the simple statement by Alan that as soon as M$ decides they're a pain in the ass, poof, there goes the VM into patented special-feature land (see kerberos for a similar f*ckjob) and no .NET viralware will run via mono. Add this to the FACT that the predominant C# compiler in use will be the M$ version. De facto factamundo. The M$ version will be "special" while the free variants will be broken. Just like the PROPER implementation of java (non-M$) was "broken" with respect to the illegal perversions that M$ inflicted on it (and thus we have C#).
M$ is not changing its tune on whit. This is NOT a gift to the developer community. It is NOTHING but a means of continuing lockin (and conversely, lockout) and moola into Gates pocket. Nothing more, nothing less. It may be a nice way to build stuff at some future time for linux but it is NOT a means of being able to run some .NET windoze binary on linux (never happen except accidentally because the code was simple enough not to include "broken" M$-only freakishness). You will find that most of the important stuff will not run. Developers will STILL not make linux-friendly stuff because the bulk of the market is in M$-doze-land and they can run the broken/perverted .NET M$_VM-only stuff.
Stone cold fact. Sing the praises of mono for having the POTENTIAL of providing a nice development environment for linux coders (though unnecessary if they'd instead focus on the correct path of Java) but don't delude yourselves that this will mean windoze binaries working on linux.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
Miguel de Icaza has committed two sins against the "spirit" of "free" software:
As I understand it, Miguel is looking at the CLR part of .NET as a productivity tool; he believes that Ximian developers will create applications faster and more reliably using a clone of Microsoft's technology. And he is very valid in pointing out that cloning .NET will follow a long tradition of "freeing" proprietary technologies. If GNU can clone C, C++, Java, Word, and what-not, why complain about cloning the .NET CLR and C#?
Miguel is not forcing anything on anyone; Gnome and GNU will not be dependent on Mono, and Mono only imposes on those who wish to use it. So long as Miguel protects existing free code from proprietary contamination, I see nothing wrong with what he's doing.
As to whether he can succeed -- well, I think he's bitten off more than Ximian can chew, in that implementing certain pieces of the .NET CLR and VM is unlikely to attract hordes of Windows-based developers, nor is it going to offer the functionality that will allow cross-platform development. Perhaps the only "evil" involved here is that Miguel's efforts may legitimize Microsoft's monopoly as a false example of the "openness" the monster of Redmond. We'll need to keep an eye on that.
In the end, Mono will sink or swim based on its merits; if developers don't like Mono, they won't develop for it, and it will go the way of the dodo. On the other hand, if Mono works, it could be a Very Good Thing by making application development easier for Linux. Time will tell.
All about me
From the statement:
:)
:)
The CIL has one feature not found in Java though: it is byte code representation that is powerful enough to be used as a target for many languages: from C++, C, Fortran and Eiffel to Lisp and Haskell including things like Java, C#, JavaScript and Visual Basic in the mix.
Let's forget for a minute what the source of this new byte code language, or standard, is. If it truly delivers the above, that would be quite an accomplishment, and probably a good thing. Remember I said, forget about the source for a moment...
What I wonder is, how does for example parrot measure up against that? Parrot seems to be moving quite slowly, but I might be mistaken since I am not involved. Since it apparently is the new engine for perl 6, I'd say it must have something going behind it.
Anyhow, one of the things with parrot is at least said to be the possibility to compile a lot of other languages besides perl, such as python or java into parrot byte code - something that indeed would be a good thing for portability and the ease of running a little of whatever on any platform. I am not sure how deep these plans actually go, and how feasible it really is.
But parrot is where I would like to set my hopes, so can anyone tell me - do I wait in vain? Is CIL really the way to go? Or are we, in reality, simply stuck with different compilers and/or interpreters for different languages?
hey slappy...
perhaps... its not "business desktops", eh?
maybe theres 10's of thousands of clients running linux out there that no one seems to be counting. or even can tell what the fuck their running. nor do they need to.
jackass.
Whahh, whahh, whahh. My side is losing the war. America is evil because I live in my mommy's basement & I will never get laid.
see subject. now if it was a good troll, but it's lame.
Let's face it. As much as we may not like it, the majority of the computing world uses some flavor of Microsoft Windows as a desktop computing environment. Now, we can argue about this from many different perspectives.
(My personal opinion is that Microsoft is not necessarily evil on account of this. To be honest, Windows is actually relatively useful -and useful is what companies require to survive. Rather, Microsoft is evil simply for what they are charging for their software. Sure, they can charge companies whatever they like (I don't care). However, the common man for his home computer should not be charged hundreds of dollars for an operating system and office software. That is truely the real evil of Microsoft and the Microsoft monopoly.)
Anyways, back to my point. Miguel is right because, like it or not, Windows is a reality that we have to coexist with. We can view this as contending or perhaps cooperating. Whatever the case, it is here and that is that.
Well, as Miguel said, Windows is here and that means that
Now, if Microsoft had done a terrible job with
Therefore, it makes absolutely no sense for us to do our own thing. Especially considering the benefits that we will recieve due to actually getting along a little bit better.
Back to my prediction. I think that the computer world is heading toward a point where specific desktop platform is a non-issue. People thinking about the short term will fret about XP this, or Gnome that. However, something like
The journey to a non-platform-centric desktop world will have many parts. One of these will be the arrival of other competitors on the scene. That is hear, with wonderful options such as Linux/Gnome (foo on KDE) and Mac OS X. Ok, KDE can play too if they manage to provide things like
Other pieces of the puzzle are things that allow applications to be used from these multiple platforms. Well, suprise but some of these are already here. They best example to this is the internet. Other examples include emerging technologies such as the
Anyways, once again, just my two cents. For what it's worth, I hope someone gets something from it.
(Go Miguel, go. Go Miguel, go!)
Makes me want to develop a .NET application today!
.NET deeply but i have the impression that writing applications on Linux that use Mono based on .NET it's a bit risky license-wise. GNOME was born because KDE was based on QT , that had a commercial license, and now it's good to use .NET ? Can someone clarify what kind of lincense does .NET have ? I think it's a key point.
Seriously, i dont know
take a look at this Java article
Great, they named the product after A DISEASE.
The first thing that comes to mind here is the term "willfull suspension of disbelief", a common concept in science fiction. He could be talking far enough in the future to be speaking fiction. However it seems to me that the first thing everyone points out when Miguel begins gushing about M$ is that he's not keeping a historical context. Of course he does set historical context here in a great feel, felt found presentation. "We feel MS is bad, I felt their APIs were bad... I found they are new and improved." It looks to me like the willfull suspension of disbelief is on the part of Miguel in trying to look at MS as a technology company. The first thing anybody takes away from an analysis of MS is that they are not a technology company, they are marketing company that packages technology. Miguel is buying it.
As for me, I prefer to use my willfull suspension of disbelief for warp drive, gravity plating and matter transmission. In spite of the fact that our understanding of physics today indicates these things to be impossible I feel it is more pallettable and quite possibly more likley than a trustworthy or technologicly sound M$.
People like me stuck with GNOME (I can remember a disasterous attempt to use way not ready for prime time 1.0 release on a college campus) because we believed in the GNU approach that GNOME was taking. Now that Mr. de Icaza is working at a high paid job, apparently none of this matters anymore, he has come to embrace the "whatever gets it done" mindset.
But would some one explain to me how a complete reverse engineering of a MicroSoft compiler and all the other bits and pieces of .Net is possibly "getting more done in less time." Not to meantion what is going to happen when MicroSoft says "no you can't do that" and sets out to put and end to it, and I think from the thier track record you can count on it. The only reason they haven't done so yet is that none of this has become a "standard" yet and Miguel seems perfectly content with helping them make it a "standard".
The notion that we should roll over and accept the fact of a .Net world flies in the face of everything the GNOME project asserted from the very beginning. They told us that we didn't have to accept proprietary standards, we could make our own. Now we are being told that it is OK to accept a "standard" that just happens to come from a proprietary company, in this case the worst of them, MicroSoft, because "I like it better" and "it will help me make stuff faster".
Well this is all just absurd. No matter how calmly he tries to assure us that everything will be OK, I think that anyone that hasn't been living in a cave knows what getting into bed in any way with MicroSoft will end up doing to you. You pick up a snake, you are going to be bitten. The only possible reason I could see for wanting to do this is for Ximian to slip in some non-free parts of Mono they want you buy (but it's OK cause it is just to connect to all the .Net stuff you already have from MicroSoft) the same way they did with evolution.
Um, RMS basicaly said "That don't sound like something miguel would say. I would be suprized if it was true."
How is that "Flying off the handle"? (not that he dosn't).
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Miguel, in an otherwise well thought out and well constructed rebuttal to TSH (Typical Stallman Hype), makes one comment I take great exception to...something to the effect of "CIL is Microsoft picking up where Java left off."
.NET like it's a great new IDEA.
.NET allows you to compile ASP code." JSP. "Tighter integration with IIS allows you to better utilize ISAPI." Servlets. "Serialization and persistance." EJB.
Excuse me, when the hell did Sun Microsystems "leave off"? Version 1.4 is coming out the door at any time, with such nice features as buffers and extensive regular expression support, and all of a sudden they've "left off"? Java will run on nearly every system ever created and in all sorts of unusual situations and suddenly Sun dropped the ball?
Look, Java is effing huge. People do write applications in it, and I'm not talking about ticker applets. Today's machines can run Sun's graphics engine as well as they can run GTK, and it's available underneath any OS. Any "work" that Microsoft is doing on the CIL has already been done by Sun, with the exception that MS' byte code executes faster and has better UI support.
But is there any wonder? An implementation of the CIL requires a lot of work on the part of the window management driver authors, meaning there's plenty of room for tuning. An implementation of Swing requires very little -- implement a fiew basic AWT classes and Swing, which is "100% Pure Java," will work atop the older class. Meaning that there has to be a lot more abstract code in Java. Meaning you can be damn sure your application looks the same everywhere and there won't be any glitches due to "factionalied" implementations.
Of course, most of the development world is still coping with the idea that different platforms require different code (hence the laundry lists inside Makefiles). The Java paradigm won't let you do that. It says, "write that shit once and deal with the slow down, it shouldn't be a dealbreaker for cross platform code." It shouldn't be. But it is. Many development houses can't get over this. Hell, I mentioned to our IT guy that I was doing our mailserver in java and he thought I meant an applet, scoffing "Write once, run nowhere."
CIL is an attempt to get under the skin of this, but it's a flawed attempt. Jesus, all the development time and heartache going into the optimization of x-platform windowing "frameworks" and "toolkits" where there already is one seems headstrong. Actually, it seems idiotic, and it's why I seethe whenever I hear somebody drop
"But C sharp has improved garabage collection, language integration and runs anywhere." Yeah, that's Java for you. "But
Jesus, why isn't Sun mopping the floor with these idiots???
Hey freaks: now you're ju
You want the long and short reason Miguel is so hot on .NET? Market share for Ximian apps, period. The technology will let Ximian write apps that they can sell to both the Linux and Windows markets. Pretty transparnt, really.
.technomancer
Anyone ever wonder about what happened to Tim Wilkinson's/Transvirtual's Kaffe Java Virtual Machine? It held great promise in its day - open source and all that, but then it just fell off a cliff - basically it is stuck in a JDK 1.1 state and full of bugs. Why did developers lose interest in it? What is Miguel doing differently to motivate Mono developers?
Craig: "But look: we're a business, okay? We're in the business of licensing intellectual property. So if it turns out that in the future that business says, "Okay, we should license the patents to people who use that in order to be compensated for the development of intellectual property," maybe we'll do that. You're always welcome to come and ask us to license anything from sources to patents. But I mean, we are a business. We're not --
...
Craig: Well, at the end of the day, if you have a patent, you enforce the patent if it's valuable to you. And so I think that Microsoft and other people who have patents will ultimately decide to enforce those patents.
Brian: Are there any patents that apply or that will apply to implementers of .Net or Hailstorm?
Craig: I expect there certainly will be. I mean, the patent process takes a long time.
Even if Miguel & Co manage to squiggle past most hurdles that are thrown at their path there WILL be gates that render their rendition of .NET if not completely useless then at least peripheral. In the most idealistic case .MONO may provide a subset of the original control-freak's architecture, and even that 2-3 years afterwards when MS is already planning its obsoletion.
.MONO ever becomes even quasi-popular MS is guaranteed to sue it off this planet over patent violations and what.NOT.
.MONO or its MS-imitating breathen is for the real industry heavyweights to get involved in FORCING GNU/GPL-compatible standards-compliance at every level.
.NET.
A recipe for a successful open environment for Linux? And if
As far as I can see the only chance for
But just sit down and think about what Miguel's saying. If his wide-eyed naivety is correct, then Microsoft is just FORCING a migration down their developers throats that will HELP them support non-MS platforms with unprecedented ease. They'd be voluntarily GIVING UP not only their OS monopoly but also their de-facto development tool stranglehold.
I'm not going to remove Gnome from my systems quite yet, but I can imagine a few independent Gnome developers preferring to look for new challenges before contributing towards Microsoft's next plan in Total Domination through
Thank god there are multiple options available for Linux so that even if a group of otherwise talented Gnome developers end up completely wasting a few years the Linux ecosystem itself won't be endengered. Such is evolution under free conditions!
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
Specifically, in what way are the Java bytecodes and VM "a bit more paranoid about things like security"? I've looked at both the specs and I don't see how this argument can be supported, but I'd seriously like to learn.
I spoke in ignorance, based on a belief that .NET supporters were serious when they were talking about the ability to run C, etc., in CLR. From looking at Microsoft's security overview, it does appear that they have things locked down pretty tight for the CLR's managed code execution.
Unfortunately, there aren't enough details there, and I was not able to find a good link to more details that would cover things like arbitrary memory access within a specific assembly, etc. Given the frequency of pointer passing in C based API's, though, I can't believe that any C code running in CLR would have much intra-assembly security.
So, it looks as though the CLR, when running managed code, at least looks as though it is on a similar footing to Java's security specs. The proof will be to see how much code winds up running within the managed CLR and how much winds up going unmanaged.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
I liked the comparison of technologies, but it misses a main point. Or rather, I believe its primary audience misses a main point.
.NET and the JVM may be limited, let's not loose track of the fact that extern "C" {} and its ilk are far more limited. Instead of limiting languages to objects without templates and continuations, the current scheme of exporting function symbols and structs is downright embarrasing.
.NET as a library/component interface and leave each language relatively intact. For example, implement your library/component in the language of choice, but export the functionality (what is currently "handled" by library symbols) in a language-neutral but far more feature-rich manner.
.NET is not perfect. The JVM is not perfect. But I strongly believe that they are a step in the right direction. For example, the current choice(?) on UNIX systems is to have C-compatible exports for libraries.
While
What would be really nice is using
Doesn't "Managed C++" allow for advanced C++ features that simply are not exported for use outside the codeblock? C# has "unsafe" blocks for its own bit-twiddling.
We're on the right track here. Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater!
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Re-read your comment about the evils of Microsoft and apply the same argument to Sun and Java. What is stopping Sun from charging huge fees for J2EE libraries? Nothing. Just because they are not presently doing it does not mean they will not in the future as their hardware revenue dwindles in light of the x86 chip's performance/price ratio. Remember - it was Sun that renegged on ISO and EMCA standardization - not Microsoft. Sun's "Java Community Process" is a complete sham and everybody knows it. Sun's vote is the only one that matters.
Sun never claimed that the JVM would be an optimal environment for bytecodes produced by other source languages. The projects that attempt to adapt other languages to produce JVM bytecode do so because it can be done--not because anyone sold the JVM for that purpose.
.NET. In his email, de Icaza hypes this feature. The JavaLobby editorial simply debunks this false claim.
.NET and CLR because this feature is hyped as a selling point both by Microsoft and de Icaza.
Microsoft is hyping the cross-source-language CLR when hawking
To summarize and to expose the strawman fallacy you try to sell us:
1. The lack of cross-source-language suitability is shortcoming for
2. The lack of cross-source-language suitability is not a shortcoming for the JVM because it is not a JVM selling point.
It is funny that you should bring-up "moral leg on which to stand," in light of your clumsy attempt at rhetorical deceit. If your mother was on a moral Thalidomide prescription while carrying you, that would explain your complete lack of moral legs. Perhaps you should check with a lawyer to see if you are eligible for payments from the class action lawsuits against Thalidomide manufacturers?
If you would read through Miguel's reply you would see that he doesn't trust that mono will be able to keep up with api changes. He says he believes the api's can all be recreated in mono, but that it is also possible that not all of them will be.
You are missing the bigger picture of what Miguel is using the CIL/C# concepts for. He very clearly states the intent is to use the MONO CIL to allow for his own development to be sped up. For anyone who's coded a medium to large scale project Miguel's remarks about 'implementing linked lists a few too many times' gets to the heart of what Mono is for. Regardless of what MS does with their API's, the Mono CIL libraries will allow for better, more reusable code to be developed.
I always did kind of think of Miguel as the Bill Gates of the open source world, its admirable that he is trying to play nice with the rest of the industry but this is obviously a way for MS to get a bunch of their patented technologies into the ximian codebase so they can kill the project at will. Has Miguel done any research into what patents MS has applied for that Mono is going to be using?
It is like Miquel has been borgefied and is now repeating a marketing chant like talk.
.net collective by creating cross compilation tools."
".net will increase your productivity - resistence is futile"
"you will join the
"Information and executable code will coexist in our different environments and our thoughts will be as one."
Somebody please remove the nanoprobes from him as he does not see that this will not help us.
Just my 2cents anyways!
Can't think of clever sig so had to settle for this! Damit it Jim I am a programm not a sig writer.
Miguel's experience with .Net seems to mirror my own. It's a very productive environment that's a blast to work in.
.Net on Windows, then having to do some work in any current GUI app dev system on Linux.
.Net, let him prove it, but don't suggest that we have to learn to live with less for political reasons.
Have you ever gotten used to working in a Unix/Linux shell then had to jump over to Windows and do something on the command line in *DOS*? Know what that feels like, that helpless feeling of losing all your magical powers?
That's what it feels like to work in
If RMS thinks he or his minions can design a better architecture than
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
Agreed, C might not be the fastest way to develop and there might be better solutions. Eventually .NET would be fine. I just wonder how long it would take to exchange the GNOME base. This "from Version X on everything will run on .NET" sounds like - "we wan't to rewrite a lot of tested code" which might delay development for a very long time until GNOME is stable again.
.NET is from MS and a hell lot of people in the OSS just don't like this company for some reasons. So no matter how good the new framework might be, i believe this decission will be the reason for a lot of people to turn away from GNOME.
There's also the physological factor which might be a problem.
...all these guys are backing Java because Microsoft has ALREADY SCREWED THEM. Your remark that Sun could do that too would be received with more acceptance (by me) if Sun were a CONVICTED LAW-BREAKING MONOPOLIST.
I want to be alone with the sandwich
Miguel is navigating dangerous waters that have wrecked other ships befoe him but he thinks himself a better captain. I have news for him: they were better than he thinks. As I see it, all of Miguel's arguments are sound and lull one into actually wanting to believe lions will lie down with lambs. Who can fault peace, love, and understanding after all? However, the real problem is not his logic but an underlying naieve assumption: that Microsoft has changed and will allow .Net to be cross platform when deployment volume becomes significant. When .Net starts to gain significant market share, they will do what they always do, add patent-protected feature that kills the cross-platform nature of their framework. It is in fact it is a deviously clever strategy--worthy of a Borgia Prince coached by Machiavelli himself. Give hope and encouragement to a large component of the open source developers which are givng Microsoft heartburn and let them devote an ever larger slice of their creative bandwidth and energy both feuding internally and developing to adopt .Net. Encourage them to do it--even help them walk deep into it and tie all their code to it inextricably. Allow .Net to change their architecture, setting the hook deeper. Then after the distraction has divided the open source community long enough and defocused Gnome, Mono and ensnared other open source projects, drop in a patented-feature that kills its cross-platform nature. They did it with Kerberos, then Samba, and lately NetApp using CIFS. I have absolutely no doubt they have not had a change of heart of strategy and will do it to Mono/.Net. It is only a matter of time. Voila--Victory Microsoft style. Miguel and Mono will be roadkill.
Miguel's argument can be boiled down to this: (1) writing big applications sucks because complexity grows geometrically with each line of code, and (2) integrating code written in different languages sucks because complexity grows geometrically with each line of code in either language. Basically, Miguel is fighting the same fight that every software engineer has faced since the beginning of time. Complexity grows much faster than anyone can handle, and as soon as you let heterogeneity into the equation, you're basically screwed.
The only problem that a CLR supposedly solves is the maintanence of the bindings. Instead of binding Gtk to perl and python and ada and C and C++, etc., you bind it in a library in the CLR. Except that to access that new CLR binding, you need to have perl and python and ada and C and C++ compilers that target the CLR, which is certainly a more glamorous job than maintaining bindings for every language under the sun, but is *WAY MORE* complex.
Basically, the CLR is middleware for the desktop. It does nothing to decrease the complexity of the system, it just shifts some of the complexity to another software engineer. Applications get easier to write, but new compilers need to be written and maintained.
When Microsoft's writing the compilers and you're shelling out the cash, you're only responsible for your piece of it - the application. Obviously this is good for you. But the free software community is responsible for all of it, from compilers to run times, to new bindings, to applications. *We* have to do it all. I wonder if Ximian will really benefit from dispatching software engineers to work on Mono when they could be working on the applications. Companies that buy stuff from Microsoft don't have to send software engineers to work on Mono, but free software projects will "lose" engineers because they'll have to work on Mono, not their respective projects.
The challege that software engineers face in the future is constructing systems that actually reduce the complexity of applications, rather than just shift the complexity elsewhere.
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside a dog, its too dark to read.
.NET has distinctions between managed and unmanaged code. Furthermore, managed code has distinctions between safe and unsafe code. Unmanaged and unsafe code (as I understand things) need much more liberal execution permissions than does safe, managed code. If you want much more in-depth information, you'll have to go to the documentation for the System.Security namespace and look at the api. There is a tutorial on it from MSDN magazine
here.
Something like,
We started copying America's ideas, and then
had problems getting them to work, and we
started playing catchup...
And then we started dropping those things we
were working on that in hindsight were original
and could have turned heads, while the higher
ups were so sure they could get those American
ideas to work, and we were even more behind...
And now Buran (the Russian shuttle copycat) is
turned into a restaurant...
You need a shirt like this to remind the ladies that they find hackers irrestable. Women constantly say to me, "You know I do dig Unix... wanna go out?"
Is Miguel crazy, what about MS's current attempt at making OSS illegal (if you dont thing they are lobbying right now for that I have some land in southern florida for you to buy)
The Scorpion and the Fox
A Retelling of an Ancient Middle Eastern Tale of Two Enemy Countries
by Ms. Holly
Once long ago in the vast lands of the desert there was a great and vast river that had to be crossed for animals to seek food and water elsewhere in the desert. As it was on this day Fox had come to the point where it had to cross the river in its travels. As it stood contemplating the best way to cross the river safely Fox's life long enemy Scorpion came upon it and began to talk to Fox.
"Fox as I was walking along the river bank looking for food I noticed a particularily easy place to cross the river where the water is not so deep and not so swift. As it is I would like to cross over myself also but as I am so small it would be impossible. Would you be willing to take me across if I show you this place to cross the river?" asked Scorpion.
"Why should I take you across? How could I possibly trust you will not sting me on the way across as we have been life long enemies?" asked Fox.
"Why would I sting you? For if I stung you it would mean you would drown then both of us would die." replied Scorpion.
Fox thought this over for a bit while carefully watching Scorpion with a distrustful eye. Eventually Fox said, "Show me where the place is and I will take you across."
"First place me on your back and then I will show you. For otherwise you may jump in and leave me behind once I show you." replied Scorpion.
Fox thought this over for a bit while carefully watching Scorpion with a distrustful eye. Then walked over to Scorpion and allowed him to climb onto its back. Scorpion directed Fox to where the river was not so deep nor so swift such that it was a safer place to cross over. As Fox was swimming across the river and had reached the middle of the river Fox felt a sharp stinging sensation on its back and realized it had been stung by Scorpion. Fox cried out, "How could you sting me we shall both drown now?"
Scorpion replied, "It is better we should both perish than that my enemy should live."
Can't think of clever sig so had to settle for this! Damit it Jim I am a programm not a sig writer.
Has Sun sued Apple over Cocoa written in Java? Has Sun sued any of the large number of companies that have implemented a native compiler for Java?
The lawsuit was specifically over JNI and RMI. Sun had no problems with strict supersets of the Java language (COM integration for example). However the native interface was replaced with RNI(?) and RMI was simply ommitted.
This means that if people coded to the spec for native integration with portable C, it wouldn't work from one target to the next. And in the case of RMI, MS simply didn't want a competitor to DCOM within DevStudio. RMI is a big deal. On a "pure" Java platform, RMI was how distributed computing was done. You take that away and suddenly you're right back with C and C++ and their myriad of options for distributed programming but lack of any consistent single API that you can use anywhere.
You'll note that MS whined that RMI was just too time consuming to be bothered with. Then after the judgement, an RMI implementation was produced in less than a month!
THIS is the reason Sun has not submitted Java to a standards body. If Java is messed with, Sun would have no legal recourse while suffering significant liabilities in keeping Java's APIs consistent. Add that to the fact that no standards body has sufficient clout to do more than look at Microsoft (or anyone else) sternly.
Do I trust Sun completely. Of course not. It is a large, public company with all of the benefits and drawbacks of a large, public company. But I trust them *enough* (with their current track record) to keep Java relatively clean and consistent -- especially in light of folks like IBM making compatible and very fast JVM implementations.
Sun isn't as closed off as people would suggest. The Java API for XML Parsing was heavily influenced from outside contributors -- especially the 1.1 version with TRAX.
Where are the cross-platform, standard C and C++ libraries for networking, threading, graphics, distributed programming, database access, XML parsing, object serialization, directory (LDAP, X.500, etc.) lookup, authorization, authentication, i18n and l10n? I'll tell you where: in the standards bodies who cannot enforce what people use nor can they do anything about people who ignore the spec.
Where would Java be if it were submitted to ISO five years ago? Right where C++ is today with Microsoft providing the only viable development platform. Woohoo.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
What i like about this, is that in the future it could well mean that i could use my windows application in linux, NOT via wine, simply because they are .NET based. This would save alot of hassle for me, because Windows crashes at a pathetically high rate, yet I have to use it!
.NET (although, it wouldn't make much sense to most developer why they should) we'd get automatic cross-platform games...something most hard-core gamers would just love!
Then,games...should games ever begin to use
Bad thing: should Microsoft ever decide they don't like Mono...well the API will somehow become so that Mono can't reimplement it.
Derek Greene
should the eifel essay be seen as commercial marketing written by ms or as a subjective thesis.. i always have my questions when someone defends a poduct that he has a commercial position with... (eifel in visual studio.. dotnet.eifel.com.... subjective?).. but i still have it admit, they kind off convinced me of the nice use of a cli.. but then again.. i think this can be archieved without the cli too.. maybe rewrite binaries to include the definition, description and list of functions/methods/objects, write a deamon that is able to runtimely 8) execute the libs on demand, so languages who want to use the specific non language lib only should create the object (whatever) throught the deamon (kindof like java relection, but language independantly 8) ) .. oh whatever, ill try to write it, and evaluate my idee, when i'm sober again... damn dopehead
Like a lot of people, when I first read that GNOME was going to embrace a Microsoft technology, I was outraged.
The more I read, however, the more it makes sense. If the bytecode is truly portable this could produce an explosion of industrial quality programs that will run on Linux. This could potentially remove one barrier that is slowing Linux's growth as a viable mainstream desktop operating system. One has got to wonder what Microsoft's strategy is to thwart this.
So, I think we should proceed and implement Mono while keeping one eye open for that giant tube of Microsoft Vaseline.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
First, let me say that I use Gnome for my desktop and have used GTK+ for sizable projects. I've even developed smaller GNOME applications and found the various API's horrible. I can't stress enough that I'm not trying to cook someone here for the sake of cooking. I think the only point he makes here is that GNOME is without a solid technology direction and has suffered dearly for it for a very long time. In fact, he as much as points this out. So, call me a troll if you like but I fail to see how Mono isn't anything other than a new tech headline. Please read below if you care to follow his assumptions while he explains pretty much nothing.
The CIL and the promise of language independence
This is what CORBA promised more or less. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Gnome start out using CORBA and decided that it needed different technologies later in the cycle?
Are there not already language bindings for C, C++, Python, Perl and I'm sure several others? So tell me again why we need an interpretted wanna-be CORBA in the mix?
This technology allows programming languages to be considered on the basis of how they will perform for a given task, and not based on the runtime libraries that you will depend. Any software engineer should read this article:
Generally speaking, good engineers already do this. The choice of yet another tool somehow doesn't make this happen, though, choice can be a good thing. Adding a slow runtime is not going to make the awesomely optimized FORTAN libs suddenly appear and become compatible with various CIL implementations. In fact, really all you can say is that when you use this technology [CIL implementations], the language of choice will no longer effect performance rather it will be forced back onto the developers to optimize for a given language; that is, language specific CIL tuning tricks. On the other hand, all of the languages which use this are going to have a negative performance impact so it sounds like programmers will have even more choice (seemingly pointless). Let's see, I can pick C or C++ for performance or I can pick C/C++/C# [CIL implementations] which performs an order of magnitude slower. Hmmm. Hard choice. Tell me again why I should care about CIL, Mono and C#??
GNOME had always tried to have a good support for multiple programming languages.
No it hasn't. Save only for the CORBA efforts, GNOME is very C biased. One of the common complaints coming from the C++ KDE camp. The more correct statement would be, "multiple programming languages have always tried to support GNOME." These efforts have inflicted various levels of pain on their bindings implementors.
They have incorporated many ideas from Java, and they have extended it to address new needs that developers had. They took where Java left off.
What does that mean? Sounds like they are re-implementing Java. Why? Why don't you just further improve Java. I'll make it known here, I've never beena Java fan but this just doesn't make sense to me. It only makes sense to Microsoft because they badly need to de-crown Java. Aside from Microsoft, I don't see how this helps anyone. By the way, what are these "new needs that developers had", that existing technologies can't address? Do we really have to move to a VM to address these needs?? Somehow this seems like we're taking several steps backward. Anyone?
Libraries have been built by disconnected groups (PNG, JPEG, Gtk+, Xml, Bonobo, CORBA spec apis, etc) and the end result is that a developer eventually has to learn more than he wanted to in the course of developing a large application.
Might this have more to do with the fact that GNOME has been wondering without direction for a very long time and no one in the GNOME camp has been willing to settle and agree on a single API nor the technology behind these APIs? Does it have to be the programmer's fault? Can't it be that the API's provided have just sucked? Can't it be that the API's have changed so fast and often that programmers wonder what they are doing trying to implement a large application via GNOME? Can't this mean that the implementations behind the API's have been less than wonderful and seemingly change daily? Does it have to be because programmers don't want to learn? Seems to me, if programmers didn't want to learn, they wouldn't be trying to develope large applications in a highly dynamic environment (from an API perspective). Wouldn't a static API help address this? Won't simply adding yet another API compound this issue even further?
There is a point in your life when you realize that you have written enough destructors, and have spent enough time tracking down a memory leak, and you have spend enough time tracking down memory corruption, and you have spent enough time using low-level insecure functions, and you have implemented way too many linked lists [1]
Doesn't this really reflect the choice of underpinning APIs and implementations behind the APIs as much as the language. It's funny, I've developed very large applications (C/C++) before and never had nearly as many issues as one does when trying to use the GNOME/GTK technologies. Might it be that you've been chasing the wrong end of the technology spectrum? Might it be that you should of been looking to replace GTK and the billion other obtuse libraries that are the foundation of GNOME with better, faster, stronger technologies? Might is be that the number of memory leaks and associated debugging issues have something to do with design skills and/or coding habits? In not in whole, in part? Some part? Maybe a little? If you have even a small problem which is compounded over and over in various suite of libs that is GNOME, might this actually result in a large problem manifesting it self as obtuse APIs which lend them self to these issues?
Evolution took us two years to develop and at its peak had 17 engineers working on the project. I want to be able to deliver four times as many free software applications with the same resources, and I believe that this is achievable with these new technologies.
Wow! This really is magic technology1 It's going to 4x the level of productivity over any other tool, toolkit, and language. Wow! Does it come with a bridge too? I can't wait.
Even C++ was invented at ATT.
Yes, you're right, however, it was written by people who wanted to look at solving real problems with a different approach while leveraging the large C programmer base. It was need driven. The same can not be said for C# and CIL. Both of these are being driven my Microsoft to side step Sun and Java. The motive is as important as anything else, especially when we are talking about Microsoft. If, according to you, it's pretty much Java with some icing, why not go the shortest and best path for everyone and help improve Java? Go ahead, make the icing for Java. Then, you'll have everything you're asking for with a whole lot less effort and TONS more people will be rewarded for your efforts.
Windows developers know how to write code for it.
Do they? Windows developers are going to be coding to GTK's and GNOME's interfaces? That's news to me. As far as I know, what this really means is that Windows C# programmers will be able to code C# on unix. Last I heard, Windows C and C++ programmers already know how to code C and C++ on unix. Please, tell me again where this magic bean grows from...
Lets make it easy to bring developers from the Windows world into our platform.
I must of fallen to sleep or something because I don't see how this has suddenly changed. Anyone?
Training materials, tutorials, documentation, tips and tricks are already available in large quantities, lets leverage this.
I seriously question this. Seems to me, that would be true as long as the programmer is really using C# and the underlying CIL implementation is the same. But, you're telling me that you're developing your own CIL and your own C# implementation so I doubt this will be true any more than it is today for any other given language and platform combination. More magic beans. Mmmm....I smell fresh brew magic coming my way...
Sorry folks, I've gone on long enough...I'm simply tired of typing. Obviously I don't see anything that he's stating other than there's a whole bunch of magic in this technology that no one has ever seen before. Furthermore, I think he helps make a wonderful argument that GNOME needs someone else at the helm. And if he's saying that he's not at the helm (I think he tried to say that too), then GNOME very badly needs someone which is not him.
Greg
development (non-gui) than C or C++, but one
can not do tail-recursion in Java, the byte
codes are not there. Therefore, you can not
implement a functional language in Java with
the same performance as one can in C or C++.
I like Haskell, but can not generate good
Java byte code because of the above.
On the other hand, I surmise that such tail
recursion enabling byte code might make
security assertions harder to prove.
Now that same argument, applied to de Icaza applies perfectly. Mono is not going to be "bound" in any way to GNOME, that much is fact. So the core product itself remains free. But more importantly, Miguel has to answer to a board of directors, whereas Linus can do (or not do) whatever he wants. They provide funding. They call the shots. They agreed to Ximian funding of Mono. How is anyone (especially RMS) entitled to an opinion here?
Regardless of RMS's embrace and extend FUD about everything being GNU (I bet very few people see it that way, but if it quacks like a duck...), he has absolutely no say about anything Miguel does, period. His argument of "Miguel better answer to the community" can be cleanly compiled to "explain this shit to me, boy".
Oh, and BTW, I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this small detail: RMS was turned down from the GNOME board of directors in November of last year. From the precedent of previous flame wars between RMS and various other people, who can say this is not simply his way of giving GNOME a bad time?
And finally, let's face it: Anything that has a relationship (remote as it may be) with Microsoft is immediately turned into an argument about "giving into the dark side" and "fight against the evil empire". That sure gives way to very constructive discussion. Most of the posts here have either tried to denounce Miguel as a traitor or simply nit-picked his reasons for doing what he's doing. Very nice.
And to Miguel: Dile a RMS que encamine sus pasos a la progenitora de sus dias y la salude de tu parte =)
Go ahead and mod me down now.
The patent issue could be a problem, but there are a few things to lessen the worry:
1)Mono is being conservative and only trying to implement things that are already in existence. See this quotation: "We are trying to stay on the safe side regarding patents. That means that we implement things in a way that has been used in the past and we are not doing tremendously elaborate or efficient things in Mono yet. We are still very far from that. But just using existing technologies and techniques." from MSDN.
2) You say: "My worst fear is everything would go incredibly well with mono: diverse compilers, robust libraries, etc. and we would all start to build code around it, and then about 5 years down the line Microsoft whips out a patent and demands royalties for all the labor that we have done under the illusion that it would be free." It is unlikely that a surprise patent is going to bite you 5 years down the line. It is true that until a patent application is finally accepted or rejected, the patent claims are secret. See 35 U.S.C.A. sec. 122(a). However, this period of secrecy is fairly short. MS submitted the API specs to the ECMA at least a year ago. Those specs are what the Mono libraries are being built on. Those specs will likely be described as "described in a printed publication." If MS wants to patent any of the API's, it has only 1 year in which to do so. See 35 U.S.C.A. sec. 102(b). Otherwise, there is a statutory bar on patentability, and the specs are in the public domain. See id. If MS has applied for those patents by now, there is a maximum 3-year time span for those claims to be reviewed and accepted or rejected by the PTO. See 35 U.S.C.A. sec. 154(b)(1)(B). Generally, however, MS would have to prosecute its patent within 6 months of the filing date. See 35 U.S.C.A. sec. 133. Therefore, "secret" patents are likely to be in hiding for less than 3 years.
I hope this allays some of your fears. Cheers!
P.S. IANAL (but I hope to be one some day), and anyone construing what I have said here as legal advice to their specific situation is an idiot.
~~~~~~~~~
dissertus scribendo latine videri volo.
well done AND very informative - actually made me laugh quite a bit.
And since you are a fairly experienced IT professional, it follows that there are none.
Therefore, anyone critisizing Miguel de Icaza's idea must be a freakish Microsoft-hating teenage socialist.
Right.
The sin Miguel de Icaza is committing against the spirit of common sense is sometimes called overoptimism.
The approach he is taking, "if I don't hurt him, he won't have any reason to hurt me when I turn my back," can't reasonably be expected to work with a patient who has amply demonstrated his ability and willingness to do anything to continue dominating the people around him.
He's also forgetting a fairly important issue: he is, in fact, on one hand, hurting Microsoft.
Of course he's also helping our patient, Microsoft, either unintentionally or intentionally, by helping The Register sow discord.
The use of the phrase "we need to be able to use the right tool in the right situation" here is somewhat misguided.
There is an simple explanation: the phrase was originally coined at construction sites where the construction workers really needed to use the right tool for the right job. Right now.
However, the kind of IT work we perform at this day and hour is, by its nature, very different from construction work.
We don't just do the thing, right now. We have to care about the mechanics of the information business. The first copy costs, the rest don't.
From this, it's quite easy to see the flaw in the "right tool" argument.
The right tool for the job might today be Java.
However, the cost of learning to use Java is somewhat more than the cost of learning to use a hammer. But what the heck, we need to use _some_ tool and Java might be the best tool to learn since it's so widely applicable.
Tomorrow the right tool might be C# and .NET.
Let's say for the argument's sake that we'll switch from Java to C# and .NET, and pay all the associated retraining and rebuilding costs. After all, C# is marginally easier to use than Java and there's a free .NET implementation.
The day after tomorrow we open the paper and lo behold! Microsoft has announced a new version of C# and .NET which they hold a patent, or some kind of similar IPR on.
Damnit, we say. But we used the right tool for the right job, what could be wrong with that?
Our environment changes so fast that we can't possibly keep track of everything.
My solution is to pick the people I trust and let them worry about the details.
I've only met Linus once, but I trust him. In (much) lesser degree I trust Sun. And who wouldn't trust Apache?
Who do YOU trust?
We should have left the current OS-oriented paradigm for end users years ago. We would have, too, except Microsoft brought the full power of their monopoly to bear to keep us chained to the OS-oriented paradigm.
.NET.
Microsoft will not voluntarily release their grip until they devise a way into another money-for-nothing catbird seat. This is what they have been trying to do by buying-up consumers (MSN and XBox) and repositioning toward subscription-based computing via
Like I said, we should have had this years ago. But so long as evolution in this direction would dry-up Microsoft's cash cow, they would not let this happen.
Now they are making a grab for domination of this market.
Microsoft cannot countenance meaningful competition because their products are technically inferior.
If you look past their deep pockets and market share, all you see is a sub-par software company unfettered by ethics. They know this. That is why they take advantage of their lack of ethics to cover for their lack of technical competence.
...but if Miguel is really interested in fast development of Linux apps, looking to Apple would seem a better bet than Microsoft. Put resources in to OpenStep...any one who has used Apple's Cocoa framework (OSX) has seen just how powerful this is, and how fast apps can be created (that look fantastic and have incredible functionality for little code) in Java or Objective-C.
Yet another language isn't going to help Linux here.
Couple of points: ... If it has already been done why do it again?
1.] OO programming is a waste of time. You spend all your time learning OO then spend all your time learning C++, then you have to actually program in C++ (haha). Huge waste of my time. Especially fitting EVERY problem into an OBJECT paradigm.
2.] The world is not made up of objects, ask any respectable mathematician or physicist.
3.] Businesses and individuals will pay money for the dumbest things, partly due to corruptive influences and partly due to stupidity. If Darwins ideas are correct EVENTUALLY proprietary software will become extinct... to include Java, C#, app servers, etc.
4.] Programmers that build the best code rule should rule but often don't.
5.] If you need a GC to manage your memory for you, then you should pick a different profession.
6.] You want to build portable applications then use gcc which has been ported to virtually every hardware platform in the known universe.
7.] why is it that when java or C# programmers say they can build programs that are "as fast as" natively compiled C programs? Do they honestly expect us to believe that?
8.] Why do we want to solve problems faster? Perhaps more "thought" should be given to solving the problem instead of calculating the actual act of the solving in quantifiable time.
9.] If a java or C# class is broken and my application uses some feature of it how do I fix it?
10.] Why should an email program be hundreds of thousands of lines of code?
11.] Why do we develop multiple versions of the same kind of program? IIRC, BitchX, XChat,
12.] If I were the CEO of Intel I'd start pushing my assembler and c compiler, with the advent of programs that run ANYWHERE why do I need to buy an Intel CPU?
13.] If I were the CEO of Intel I'd Intelize Linux as much as possible, as soon as possible. For example the Intel Linux runs "rings" around the competition...Make it open source, etc. That will sell Intel/Linux boxes.
Miguel says: So when you copy your binary from Windows that was compiled with the Visual Studio.NET and run it on your Unix platform, it will just integrate nicely with your GNOME desktop.
.NET CLI integration with KDE?
Hmmmm, I wonder what the KDE people would have to say about that. Is there any talk on the KDE mailing lists about
I haven't heard anything from Miguel addressing this subject, but I am sure he must be aware of this.
.NET.
.NET, if only because it is from Microsoft. Some would use it even if it was just a warm pile of doo-doo....
....which it is not, as C# was designed by Anders Hejlsberg, one of the better minds of current software development, as well as I'm sure of a bevy of other not-exactly-morons at microsoft. Sure there copying Java, but from what I've read, they've made up some of the annoying things about it already(such as being able to transparently access primitives and their object wrappers).
There is no one out there(at least on this site) that does not seriously believe that Microsoft will try to embrace and extend projects such as Mono out of existence if they start to challenge their hegemony in this domain. Does this necessarily mean they will be successful? They have submitted it to the ECMA after all, and if they are holding bits back, well,then that's going to be a problem for both Mono and
I imagine what Miguel is thinking is that here is an opportunity to give to the open source community a cross-platform, cross-language tool. Obviously, this is a pretty bold goal, and it may not succeed. But in my mind it is a fantastic one, and I applaud him for striving for it. Is it the best way to go about? Would they be better off getting on the Java bandwagon(which has it's own licensing problems) or Perl(which has questionable momentum) or something else alltogether? I don't know the answer to this for certain, but from where I am sitting he hasn't made a bad one because:
1) Most of the hard design and specification work has already been done for him by Microsoft(and don't think Microsoft is thrilled about this...I'm sure it pisses the hell out of them but at the same time they saw it as necessary to compete with Java).
2) You know a lot of people are going to get behind
3)
All good mitigating factors in my mind. Still, it's far from a sure thing. But neither are most really cool innovative things...
John
Lots of insightful comments, but no one's actually picked out the yawning chasm of a non sequitur in the Mono programme:
If you like some of the Dotnet features, you have to clone the Dotnet Framework
I might like my mother, but I'm not about to clone her so I'll someone to marry in a few years - I know that her virtues can be found in other forms.
For example, we could develop a new CIL that was based on Scheme, but which could support programs originally written in Java syntax. This might be a better language superset - certainly many early LISP developers intended it to be an intermediate language, so the parens were always optional in essence.
Consequently, the only possible justification for cloning the Dotnet Framework is that MS tools will facilitate development of Mono apps, and that (equivalently) Dotnet apps will port to Mono. And on this point, it seems the crowd has spoken with one voice - it just ain't gonna happen.
There is a quote somewhere (I can't remember) where the guys at Eiffel said they tried for ages to get Eiffel to compile to the JVM but it couldn't be done, while it was easy for dotnet.
Gates even got arrested for driving his Porche too fast. And Jobs apparently had to beat the ladies off with a stick.
Lies about crimes
It's my understanding that J2EE is free for use even in commercial programming. Is this not the case?
I never said the work RMS was doing is bad, I said he's firey and has a tendancy to kneejerk. Demanding a response before investigating Miguel's comments is pompus.
Mods: Please moderate my comments to is not one with the hive mind (-1) from now on instead of veiling them in stuff like "redundant", thanks.
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
That sounds a lot like IBM's OS/2 strategy: Windows 3.1 apps work great on OS/2, so developers will want to try out new OS/2 specific features. NOT.
cpeterso
I'm sorry, but it needs to be said, what is the story with these stack based virtual machines? Isn't a stack based virtual machine a dipology of good sense? I mean really, who actually sat down and thought "yes, you know, it's a good idea to binary translate from a language that is significantly different (stack based) from the target language (register based), and, to do it at run time". What's the sense here? Exactly, what is it? As I sit through my 20 minute install of random piece of java software I have to wonder, couldn't it be compiling those bytecodes to something native right now? Like, even if it still did the groovy runtime optimisations, it could save itself a whole shitload of trouble it was to precompile it. As for the whole signed/unsigned duality, yes, I hit that in a major way as I tried to write my JVM backend for GCC. Try compiling any normal C program without unsigned types, go on. Then there's the lack of unstructured memory, object store, etc, etc. I'd like to see a C compiler for .NET that doesn't suck ass -- I hereby claim it cant be done. When you embrace .NET (or for that matter Java) you are killing native code compilation and, more importantly, you are killing C. Some people might like that but I happen to love the C language (well, not the C99 extensions, but hey).
How we know is more important than what we know.
Pardon me? Are we in a time warp? CIL is just another incarnation of P-code, and one under the control of a company with massive contempt for allowing competition. You can do the same thing with Java, and SUN doesn't currently have the clout to play the same sorts of games that Microsft can and has.
The GNAT developers have been able to compile Ada into Java byte code; I see no obstacl to doing the same thing with simpler languages.
Nice clarification.
:)
But you forgot to pacify RMS, so I'll do that.
"We're taking the best idea MS has had in awhile, and doing it *better*."
One point Miguel made really made me sit up and take notice. He pointed out that all of Gnu started out as Richard Stallman's attempt to make a free copy of a proprietary system, and Mono is just another attempt to do that same. I'd never thought of it that way, but he's right; it is very hard to remember in this day and age that 20 years ago, AT&T and company were really a lot like Microsoft as far as their treatment of end users, so why was it good for Stallman to propogate the then-evil-and-proprietary Unix interface and bad for De Icaza to propogate the .NET interface?
hee hee. Forget .net, BillG's gotta hate it when
that happens.
As I remember it met the standard, however it allowed the programmer to use Windows only features. So if the programmer used the Window's only features the program became non-compliant. MS-Java would still run other java compliant programs, and if you followed the java standard, what you wrote could be run on any other JVM.
I/O, I/O, its off to disk I go, with a read and a write, and a bit and a byte, I/O, I/O, I/O, I/O
I forgot to add this to my posting:
DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS!
(Slashdot forced me to put more text than the three words, lame)
I am not exactly, totally enthusiastic about this idea of being able to use ANY language for a given programming project or combination thereof.
.Net architecture with a CLI as envisioned by Microsoft should produce software with unessacarily high engineering requirements than a single language platform.
.Net MONO vision for a Linux app would quite possible require COBOL, C, Java, PERL, FORTRAN etc programmers to cooperate in building a new desktop app or feature.
I have these reasons, personally, as a matter of observation in the software engineering of large complicated systems.
But I would like to make some observations:
1) The US Military in the early 80's and 90's had enourmous problems with private sector bids and implementation, of software in defense systems.
Namely, every vendor delivered a portion of the system in a different language. Some languages were specifically invented to deliver the final product.
These systems were large and complex, and non trivial engineering problems developed between vendors who needed to integrate thier combined efforts to deliver the product.
2) As systems were delivered the cost too maintain them was very high due to the fact there was no common reference for the software implementation.
What I mean by this is, if you have a flight control system, or launch control system, and it has a bug or engineering issue. It is very difficult to see exactly what the problem is if it incorporates or was delivered with 8 different computer grammars.
3) These systems had artificially short life spans due to the fact they could not be easily upgraded. That is too say, for example, the above flight control system coulnd't be upgraded because the target language(s) could not be reimplemented on new hardware.
My point about MONO and CLI?
Which is:
1) If we accept the historical data on building complicated pieces of software, we can reduce the costs of a implementation if it is reduced to one language or computer grammar to build its entire scope.
The military's solution to this was to produce key critical compenents of a defense system project using one reference specification. The computer grammar they picked was called ADA.
I question if the CLI is actually a good idea in a concept that allows or permits multiple language platforms to cooperate, if the goal is to produce software that is easy to use, is of low defects and is cost effective.
Historically the military with budgets far beyond anything commercially accesible couldn't do it and produce quality defense systems.
2) If the CLI provides a capability to produce a GNOME vision of support for multiple language platforms, given historic research in the software engineering areas, CLI suggests that anything built with a
3) Considering the fact that such a system would produce diverse computer grammars in any authors favorite language, for contributing authors, a future
If we accept that historic software engineering suggests multiple computer grammars result in systems that:
1) Require a very high engineering cost.
2) Quality of the software suffers because fewer individuals can access the entire code base to make corrections.
Personally, in IMHO organizational scalability and human productivity issues in building this sort of software are problems with N different grammars being used to build a single piece of software.
Therefore, I believe CLI is really not a positive addition to an Open Source Project.
-hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
My reason is pretty simple, even if the compatibility is only one way, i.e. compiled on mono works on Windows but not the reverse.
Then I (and perhaps you) are ahead of the game.
I can now work on stuff using a language that simplifies a lot of things (it's only convenience, but boy is convenience fun). And I can share it with my windows friends.
If they want to work on my project, they'll install mono on windows and compile stuff that will work on Linux. I win. I get more bug fixes and they don't have to dual-boot in Linux.
The quality code that Open Source provides gets more coverage has more people start using our developement tools...
'GNU is a free re-implementations of Unix...'
Hey! I thought GNU is Not Unix!
Get your recursive acronyms right buddy.
"It takes many nails to build a crib, but one screw to fill it."
look -
i do a little more than "install linux", k?
now.. as for Miguel's "influence" and "brain" prowess...
his influence has been terrible. almost every idea of his gets large amounts of criticism and not the good kind either. his influence is DIVISIVE and not UNITIVE. its like... what is he trying to acomplish besides stroking his own ego? (yes yes, all the big guys have nasty egos, i know)
he's a very smart man, i'll give him that, and evolution is quite a nifty piece of software. But, i dont think that his design for the Gnome system is all that good. as a matter of fact, its a bitch to code for, overly complex and bloated. yes, bloated.
now, he's dealing with msft, who has been known to screw anyone who gets into bed with them. yay. please, come corrupt linux... go miguel...
Remember this?
How we know is more important than what we know.
look-
give reasons, instead of rants, and people might consider your statements
Look - what is Microsoft? It is a big company, one which is in a serious crisis right now - it's main revenue streams are drying up in the form of slow Office/Windows XP sales (well, slow compared to what they need to be). Hence Hailstorm, which is a big part of .NET
So - consider that Linux is the first real competition MS has had on the desktop/server market for years (forget apple, they have survived by selling to a niche, mainly artists, not business/home). Now consider that they are desperate for cash, lots of it.
So, considering all that, how likely is it that MS will invest millions into a new platform for Windows, and then allow it's primary competitor to make it about a zillion times easier to port code from Win32 to Linux? Not very is the answer. Remember this - Microsoft HATE Linux: their corporate leaders see open source as "wrong" etc, and of course Linux is already good as a server and making headway on the desktop, so how do they respond to this threat?
Seems obvious - they need .NET, but what they don't need is to be giving their competitors a leg up by developing an expensive technology. They'll try and keep .NET Win32 only, and they won't have to try hard. Yes, yes, we all know about the ECMA submissions, but lets face it: There are standards, and there are standards. C#, CLI etc. will be de-facto standards soon, but that doesn't make them anymore acceptable, regardless of whether they've been rubber-stamped by ECMA or not.
Having said all that, you've got to give Miguel respect: he knows good technology when he sees it and isn't afraid of politics. I love some of Microsofts software, I just don't love the company. Problem is, in cases like .NET they are inextricably linked.
yeah. anyway, rant over. it's much longer than i thought it would be anyway.
thanks -mike
OK, so the fantastical claim is that one could run .NET doze binaries via Mono (balderdash). Why is Mono in this regard going to be ANY different than wine? Windoze APIs are published so software developers can write windoze apps. C# is "published" - the APIs are there so anyone can use them. Big frickin' deal. Even with the published windoze APIs, with wine you can only run a fraction of a percent of windoze apps. The problem IS the intimate tie-in of API to windoze proper. C# APIs are no different (if they are, WHY?). They have their fingers tied right into the OS too.
All it seems that aspect of Mono is about is duplicating wine in a .NET framework instead of the classic win32 framework (which ties into .NET and C# since they ARE the windoze API that you are playing with when writing doze code, yes?
So the fantastical claim is that Mono will do better than wine at implementing doze api/functions in linux. That's what wine tries to do and they've been at it for years! It's nice, and all, but there's a buttload of windoze apps that just don't work in wine. By the time they do (IF they do) there will be new apps out there that people want to use that WONT work. Why wouldn't Mono experience the exact same problem?
.NET is designed with WINDOZE in mind. It is the target platform of .NET. To Gates, the internet and computers are and/or should be Windoze PCs or Windoze handhelds, etc. Everything else is invisable to Gates or is something to be extinguished.
Unless someone can explain why JUST because C# APIs may be published that means jackdiddle (vis a vis win32 apis being published and the success of wine) for running windoze .NET crap on linux? Even if you refer to VMs, the VM is designed by and for Windoze and M$, NOT competitors (or potential competitors).
I think that if Miguel and Ximian want a "better" developer environment, then fine, speak of ONLY that but forget about (entirely) .NET and anything Windoze/M$. It is pollution that will not work out and it confuses the issue. You like the development environment of .NET? Fine, go with a similar development environment for LINUX and that is ALL.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
Sadness :(
We don't got no swing for gcj, either.
No swing = no gui = no rocking fast java apps.
Something tells me they'll end up writing a followup article that claims they were right all along, setting aside the fact that it was merely an interview with a single source.
...and let someone at FSF at least take a look at the BNF (or whatever) for Java and C# and come up with some kind of well designed language that is not controlled/created by Sun or MS.
Properly designed, such a language could practically auto translate from C# or Java.
The back end JIT could make Java, CIL or FSF(?) bytecodes.
Don't let MS destroy the free side. Get rid of Miguel and his greed/power worship now.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
They're saying "You know, I do dig eunuchs... Wanna go out?"
And if you're wondering, yes, I know...
That's a core part of the Mono project... Creating compatible libraries that work on Linux. Because of the OOP nature of the .NET frameworks, Mono can (and hopefully will) be ported to other OS's, like MacOS X. Linux gets Gnome-specific GUI tie-ins, and the Mac will eventually get Aqua-specific tie-ins.
Given the frequency of pointer passing in C based API's, though, I can't believe that any C code running in CLR would have much intra-assembly security.
The Java environment also uses a lot of pointer passing (in fact, it's impossible to pass a non-primitive type by value in the Java language without explicitly calling a copy constructor) but apparently, the difference between what people refer to as a "reference" vs. a "pointer" lies in whether pointer arithmetic is allowed.
Languages may allow what looks like C-style pointer arithmetic through iterators that overload the following operators:
Will I retire or break 10K?
I can already run them on Windows. In fact, I can run them on windows with IBM's or Sun's Virtual Machine. Should I want it to run on .NET, I would have to rewrite all the code to use .NET APIs instead of Java APIs. Since I have two years invested in our current project, that is a lot of rewritting that I cannot afford. Plus, I would lose the WORA app that we currently have.
FYI: JUMP is only for the Java language and not the API. Furthermore, it's only for Java syntax up to 1.1.4 (Microsoft's final release of Java from 1996?)
Okay, I must admit I have lost all respect for GNOME/Ximian, now.
.NOT Framework, then it will be just as bulky and unreliable as windows programs.
Miguel has this "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" attitude, which usually goes along with being a follower, not a leader. Some friends I have, who are also MS people, always jokingly say, "Don't fight it... don't fight it! Let Uncle Bill take care of you!". I really hate that way of thinking.
Open source is about pure innovation, and problem solving, not porting others' work over to the free world (necessarily).
The other beef I have is with his comments regarding productivity. He says he has reached a point where he has "implemented too many linked lists", etc etc. My problem is, a good programmer knows how to reuse his/her code, and not reimplement ALL of it from scratch every damn time. You know why Microsoft's code is so bulky and unreliable? It's because they made their API's so attractive to lazy programmers who "don't want to deal with all that hard stuff" by doing it all for them. You write a "hello world" program in windows, and you'll be lucky if it isn't under 200Kb, because the routines and libraries that actually got compiled in are the same ones MS Office uses.
If we ignore the small and tedious details to programming, and base GNOME on the
Good software is not made by people who want to "get it done quickly and efficiently", it's made by people who want to spend the time to do it right, and "get it to run quickly and make it efficient". It's only one way or the other... we can drag 'n drop our way to building an application, but it sure as hell won't be as fast/reliable/efficient/good as a program written in a text editor, compiled by hand, checked and rechecked.
About 15 years ago, the city I grew up with threw its Mayor out of office.
The Mayor, it turns out, had worked out a deal with the only commercial lumber & hardware supplier in town. He would modify the building codes for the city so that anyone who wanted to build a new home would have to go to this one specific lumber provider to get their raw materials.
Today, the community I grew up with is about to throw Miguel out of office.
Miguel, it turns out, had worked out a deal with the only language-independent framework provider in town, Microsoft. He's trying to modify the way in which programmers build so that anyone who wants to build new apps has to go to this one specific provider to get their raw materials.
The Mayor of my home town hasn't held office, or worked anywhere, since.
Bowie J. Poag
Samba has to inter-operate with an M$ OS. if the OS evolve in some ways
that cannot be copied (patents), then Samba is screwed.
Mono does not aim to inter-operate with any other OS.
If it manages to do it, it's a bonus.
If M$ stops it from happening, Gnome still has a very nice programming
framework that M$ *cannot* take away from us in any shape or form.
Mono will be a success even if it ends up being entirely incompatible
with what M$ is doing, simply for the fact it will bring a great set of
features to Gnome.
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So basically, with this new CIL thingy, all my years of qbasic experience might translate into usable cross platform apps? GREAT!
rhy
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Great reply, but does not mention these benefits and disadvantages:
.NET (see the 'just ask Alan comment above)
benefit 1) to author 1 component, you write 1 file, as opposed to authoring IDL files, C files, OAF files, and gods know what.
benefit 2) no more gtk+, gtk-- etc.
benefit 3) compared to java, a lot of my complaints have been solved - C# has destructors, attributes, foreach keyword etc.
benefit 4) I can use MS Visual Studio.
benefit 5) haven't tried yet the ActiveState kit, but now it looks trivial to link in a Perl subroutine.
problem 1) MS can screw you over by patenting part of
problem 2) MS can modify interfaces ('right to innovate', haha) to make sure your code stops working w/ theirs.
problem 3) C# lacks generic programming. (java also)
problem 4) for graphics programming (forms etc) you need to start using MS concepts such as Pen and Brush. So you have to create a pen before you can draw anything. You cannot just say 'graphics.drawLine(Color.Red,0,0,100,100);'
Other than that, I am excited just like Miguel.
I am downloading the Mono stuff. This might make me more insterested in Gnome than KDE.
George
.NET claims that any of the supported languages can be "first class citizens" of the platform. After reading .NET environment without re-writing the code to be more .NET friendly.
.NET environment ? Please explain how I can add C++ objects by reference or by pointers to .NET collections.
this article: it became pretty obvious that not all languages are created equal. This is definitly not my father's C++. Please, can someone explain how specific language features (pointers) are handled in the
If C or C++ components use pointers, can they crash the whole
Its incredible that people have lost their understanding of what a godsend the UNIX API is. Right now, you can download random POSIX programs off the internet and reasonably except them to compile correctly on your machine, whether you're running Linux, BSD, or (gasp!) BeOS. Its the portability of .NET without its performance problems and with the addition of an emphasis on open source software. Isn't that the way it should be?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
-- Welcome to nowhere fast / nothing here ever lasts.
Remember the Alamo!
This is exactly what I was looking for.
You've gotta be kidding. With the way the patent office is granting patents on ideas that are not only obvious, but which also have plenty of prior art behind them?
In that kind of environment, it doesn't matter whether or not a technique you use is obvious, nor does it matter that it's been in use for some time. The patent office will happily issue a patent against it.
Your citations of the law make no difference. For one thing, the patent office has been ignoring the law when it comes to issuing patents. For another, the mere threat of patent litigation is going to be enough to cause a small company like Ximian to fold, because patent litigation (like any litigation beyond small claims court) is horrendously expensive.
You'd have to be an idiot to bank on someone like Microsoft not coming after you and others for patent violation, no matter how they obtained their patent(s) or how obvious/popular the techniques in question are. But that's exactly what Miguel is counting on.
I can't think of a better example than Mono to use to demonstrate that when deciding what kinds of architectures, protocols, and tools to use for an open source project, you're better off choosing the best, and not what you think the most popular will be.
I have a strong suspicion that .NET on the server side will be easy to do under Linux (with the exception of authentication, which will be strongly protected by patents), but .NET on the client side (which is what Miguel is working on) will prove impossible. That's because Microsoft will build Win32-specific things into their .NET client libraries. Or have we already forgotten what they did with Java??
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
I'm inclined to think Mono and associated technologies are more about a business agenda and less about developing a productive development environment. The side-affect of developing a .NET clone, appears to me... is that it will spur the growth of Linux based systems in the commerical markets. Another side-affect is that this effort could spur on the Java technologies to appear more quickly.
Regards,
Kramer
Oh, Bill, twist my nipples while you dribble Visual Astrolube# all over my hot latin bunghole!!!! And then put your MicroCock XP into my ass while I shout about all the wonderful things Microsoft has given me, including anal bleeding.
Jeezus. Someone check Miguel's swiss bank account for a large deposit from MS. I bet he was paid off in dollars and MSCum++.
Hi,
.net / Open Source Developers will run on Windows. But it is unsure, if the software of the .net / Closed Source Developers will run on Linux et. al.
no one mentioned the point, that MS will gain of the Open-Source-Community.
As they wrote in the Halloween-Papers, they are deeply impressed, how the OS-Movement collects the intelligence of lots of Programmers.
And if Alan Cox and some other guys will be right, the software written by the
Do you really want to be exploited by MS?
Timeo Danaos et Dona Ferentes!
küsschen
A simple library interface into GNOME is sufficient that any object may load the library and write Gnome applications. To deviate into the realm of
the CLI conversions. Most likely, interest will
not be there for researchers to port Lisp to CLI, and Perl 6 will not re-bytecode itself to run under CLI versus Parrot. Furthermore, if some of the interest in accepting Microsoft's paradigm is platform independance, you must realize that microsoft has crippled all platform independant standards it can acquire and produces competing standards to all others. To select an environment proposed by an organization AT DIRECT ODDS with Linux is to potentially sign the death warrant for Linux. Just as Microsoft is afraid of accidental GPL infection, Gnome must be similarly afraid of Microsoft infection. If we become bound to their CLI spec (and we will be, they have the critical mass to control it), we will NOT be
in control of the CLI spec. They will. And
having a spec that is not open to community
review is total suicide.
I repeat, suicide.
When I looked at Java the first thing I noticed was the lack of unsigned data types and anything less than 32 bits for integers (or maybe I just read the wrong documents). I'm used to reading in a data structure and having various data fields of 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, or 256 bits, both signed and unsigned, depending on what the field really requires. The embedded processors I'm used to talking to range from 8 bit PICs to 16 bit DSPs to 32 bit 68030s. These systems don't waste 32 bits of storage/processing when 8 bits will do.
A business partner is working on a Java based data logger and is having to do all sorts of tricks to access these fields, while it is easy for me to declare a "record" in Delphi or "struct" in C to access these fields. As far as I can tell about the CLR these types of fields and structures are easily accessed. It seems to me that being able to support non-crippled languages is a great plus for CLR.
Yes, I realize that I'm one of those preverts that thinks object pascal is far better than C++, but doesn't the world need some preverts :)
The problem with "frameworks" that appear now -- Java, all generations of COM, .NET, etc. is that they basically don't do anything useful. They are implementations of someone's "vision" how software is supposed to be developed, and how existing two component models -- that is, one provided by shared libraries, and another one by interprocess communications, should be replaced by something more "object oriented". And all those visions are wrong, simply because at this point mankind has as much chances to develop a better component model as thousand years ago it had chances to develop better means of long-range transportation than a horse and a sailing ship -- the level of technology was inadequate for that and will be for quite a while.
But people are ambitious and instead of writing little useful things -- say, a serializer for data formats that will simplify communications, they are trying to create a GREAT NEW SYSTEM with everything existing replaced with some GREAT NEW IDEA plus every petty piece of idiosyncaasy that a particular developer or company has at the moment. That produced Java, and that plus typical Microsoft's aspirations to create more incompatibilities per hour than they were able before, produced .NET.
The fact is, for a programmer who is writing a new code, "framework" like this gives very little -- dynamic libraries existed for a long time, anything written in C can be now called from any other language that can load a library, and IPC is still not used at its full potential, especially considering that programmers (Gnome ones included) were indoctrinated with superstition that context switches are more expensive than additional in-core pages while in modern systems context switches are cheap, IPC is efficient, but data-structures bloat that causes huge amount of data sitting in memory in a tangled mess becomes a huge problem for speed even if memory itself is cheap.
For a programmer who wishes to use components developed for Windows it gives nothing, too -- the whole strategy of Windows development is to keep things unusable outside Windows, and certainly mixing few proprietary pieces in the mix will poison everything developed on Windows just like things being developed now are poisoned for everyone who agrees to anything less than a complete emulation of every ugly piece that Microsoft managed to throw into Windows. In other words -- if you will want to run something developed for Windows, you will need Windows, all Windows and you will have very little chance to add anything but Windows. You can emulate it, but then you will basically become it. So all this talk about "inevitable success" of .NET on Windows is pointless -- at best you can outrun them (despite some umm... strange ideology changes that reminds me Communist Party line, the development of GNOME is going fast enough), at least you can ignore them (Microsoft will replace it with something else soon anyway), but you can't assimilate them.
Oh, btw., the use of borg-style metaphors was intentional but not essential to this piece of advice.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
C++ has a rudimentary but surprisingly effective memory management tool called the autoptr (or auto_ptr, depending on who's talking). It's essentially a thin class wrapped around a pointer. When the class goes out of scope, the autoptr destructor is called. It deletes the pointer contained within the class, thus returning whatever was pointed at to the memory pool. It ensures proper object destruction, etc., etc.
If you don't know about the autoptr, then maybe you'd better not make statements about C++'s lack of memory management assistance.
I've used the autoptr a fair bit, and it's a surprisingly handy and low-overhead way of solving a lot of dangling-pointer errors.
Then why implement a C# compiler for it?
.NET truly is a good technology, which stands on it's own merit, and not because it happens to be the next lock-in tool of corporate behemoth Microsoft, then why would it not be immediately useful as a platform for existing proven Linux development tools and techniques?
.NET is a complete waste of time, which will fail to gain critical mass, despite the enormous pressure on developers from that fucking clown Steve Ballmer and his crew.
.NET ever play a significant role in it's frameworks.
Surely implementing something already in wide use within the Linux community - C, Java, Perl or Python would be much more useful than implementing some new, unproven toy language like C#.
If
Personally, I think
.NET offers nothing we don't already have except for the 'Made by Microsoft' stamp, but it's been a long time since that mark held any sway over me and my choice of development tools.
Obviously, Miguel de Icaza is free to do whatever floats his boat, but you can count me as a 'former user of the GNOME project' should
Maybe its petty politics and free-software rhetoric from RMS etc. that has led me to this decision, but thats how disillusioned I am with Microsoft and it's products.
I don't trust them, don't like them, and I feel much gratitude to the developers of Linux and all that has been built on top of it that lets get as far away from Microsoft and their shithouse software as possible.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
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(That apparently explains why when I request an install from Ximian.com, apt-get reports that the one package of evolution is going to consume something around 110MB of disk space...)
Unfortunately, the design of Java is such that it nicely interoperates with, well, Java, and um, Java, and, um, not too much else. (Unless you jump into FFI stuff that's always terribly fiddly, and leaps you back into writing constructors and destructors in C for the interface code...)
The "JVM" thing offers some portability, but Java suffers from the huge problem that all the Kool Stuff in J2EE and Swing and such that you'd like to use is, well, only marginally less encumbered by Sun licenses than .NET services will be by Microsoft licenses.
Count the number of major Java apps that are installed by default in your favorite Linux distribution. That number is usually zero, as you get to choose between:
And it really wouldn't do anything to solve the problems at hand, as it still mandates spending lots of time writing constructors and destructors. Plus there's no quasi-standard ABI, so that you'll be recompiling incessantly.
And then there's the KDE problem where library loading takes quite a bit of time because of resolution of virtual methods...
But I think the real reason for "no C++" is simply that Miguel doesn't much like C++.
So Miguel wants something a tad more dynamic than C/C++, particularly vis-a-vis memory management. I find it a little disappointing that he didn't take a serious look at some of the mature languages already out there.
- GNU Ada is a whopping lot more mature than G++, for instance, and would offer some "software engineering" merits.
- There are a good set of Eiffel compilers, and that combines OO with GC as well as the "Design by Contract" thing that Miguel has consciously tipped his hat to.
- Modula 3 is another "unsung language;" OO plus GC plus well-defined threading, even.
If he's looking for a better language in which to build more stuff like Evolution, I'd think these three to be eminently plausible Good Alternatives to designing a new Virtual Machine environment along with a whole set of compilers.If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
"Forget all you heard about .NET." This is a good quote. So let's for a moment forget about the superfluous features of C# and the .NET Framework, like machine-independance. What does it get you in the end? Faster application development.
I think that Miguel and the whole GNOME community is tired of being "second-best" in the desktop environment competition with KDE. The simple fact is that (not unlike Win32) plain old C and GTK+ are complex, error-prone development environments that no one will much miss. In fact if you look at GTK+, much of the GNOME team's time has been spent trying to copy object-oriented design features that are intrinsically availiable in other languages.
KDE has a secret weapon in its usage of C++ and QT; the true object-oriented approach is simply better and faster for large projects. If you haven't programmed, you won't realize that QT is basically "Java Swing for C++." The KDE project pushed out their next-generation desktop months ahead of the GNOME boys and they're not looking back now.
I say, hurrah to the GNOME team if they do finally pick a new, better, faster development environment. However, I am worried that instead of relying on proven, existing, free (as in GPL) technology like g++ or QT3 they will waste entirely too much time reimplementing the basics.
As usual. Did I say that? Don't want to sound biased!
|-) <----- geordi.
Tetris rules.
Um... wouldn't boycotting these technologies (such as they are) make their reach that much less than if you weren't boycotting them?
Weird to be seeing hardcore Microsoft propaganda from an open source project leader. Why doesn't he just go over to Microsoft and work for them if he wants their stuff deployed that much? Why is he even bothering to be involved with free software at all? Of course, didn't he also arrange to have a free project _drop_ the LGPL and go with a more proprietary-friendly arrangement? Who is this guy?
An ancient verse in Open SOurce Lore...
Gee, so I guess that makes Miguel de Icaza Celebrimor, building his own runtime based on secrets given to him by the Dark Lord of Redmond, disguised as Annatar, Lord of Gifts. Maybe RMS is Elrond, watchful and distrustful of this mysterious being bearing secrets...
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
but you have probably forgotten about this thing with long running applications - they tend to fragment heap... It does not hit you often, but when it does, it's a kill. Last time I checked there were no indication that there is a destructor writing pattern that helps you with fragmentation.
The way Miguel has been getting a lot of flak reminds me of the Apple billboards "Think Different".
It seems people with a vision sometimes are unfairly critized.
Miguel has a vision and is more than a step ahead of the crowd.
Lets cut him some slack and wait to see if he is a genius or an idiot, NO?
The long term plans for Java include items such as tail-recursion and templates but they came up too late in the dev cycle to include in 1.4 without pushing the release date out too far. 1.5 is slated to have an updated bytecode format (although presumably backwards compatible in much the same way that 1.02-era applets still run for the most part in JDK 1.3)
.NET
Don't presume that Java isn't a moving target for
It's not like Sun and IBM are planning on standing still and waiting for Microsoft to catch up.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Right. A proof of concept was when other languages were compiled to java bytecode. There may have been earlier ones too.
If I remember correctly is used in Borlands C++ Builder & Delphi to some extent. C++ Builder compilers down to the same thing as Delphi and if I remember correctly they use the same linker. ... I beleive this is where they got this ideas behind CIL and combined it with the Java virtual Machine model.
Um. Nope. CIL stands for Common Intermediate Language.
Neither Delphi nor BCB are interpreted, JIT'd or run on virtual machine. Nor do they use an intermediate language of any kind.
The language that they have in common is in fact x86 assembly. The reason that the Delphi VCL can be used in BCB is that they share an object file format.
Maybe the idea of sharing a class library came over from Borland with Anders Heijsberg, but the method of achieving it is different.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
I think the open source community should give a chance to the ANDF/TDF technology in this field. It has the advantages Miguel tells mono has, but the concept under ANDF is simply better than that behind VMs, and it is 'software libre'. See this links:
/.
2 40 &mode=thread
...
h tm
Article from Bruce Stephens in
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=98/10/20/116
A quote:
> P-code, JVM,
>
> The format isn't much like previous universal
intermediate languages.
> Largely, they were abstractions of machines; this is an abstraction
> of programs, or of programming languages. i.e., it retains all the
> interesting information that you need for performing optimizations;
> it just loses details like variable names.
ANDF Home
http://www.andf.org
ANDF Tools
http://i44w3.info.uni-karlsruhe.de/~andf/tools.
hectorNO@SPAMtheinbox.org
COBOL
Mercury
Python
Component Pascal
Mondrian
RPG
Dyalog APL
Oberon
Scheme
Eiffel
Pascal
SmallTalk
Fortran
Perl
Standard ML
- I assume they're also targets for mono.
Francis.
I hope it helps convey your message.
.Net you'll always be behind -- I don't understand the argument. If you *don't* start implementing it, you'll be even farther behind -- unless they're suggesting that you use something even better. If that's their suggestion, then perhaps they could point it out to you.
Really, those people who claim that if you start implementing
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
Today, I do quite a bit if work on AIX... Perl, Shell stuff, some C... prior to that, M$ technologies - Scripting - VB, Java, Perl.. lots more C... and tracking my programming career of 22 years, I've worked with quite a few languages. In that time, always bring the systems programmer type, there always seems to be one or two neat things I'd like to do from another language in a current project.
One example is using regular expressions... A few years ago, the company delevopment standard was VB so naturally, most of what I wrote is VB Script - with a lot of the real work done in my own C objects. I handle a lot of text so I wanted to use regexs for some maych/replace stuff. VB stunk at this (as well as their broken split function) I didn't know enough Perl at the time so I decided on JavaScript - beautiful - 2 lines of code. I wanted access to the submatches array back in VB... nope! Can't write to a VB style array in javascript and pass it back. Moreover, the nonsense required in C is much crazier - MS C has some BSTR and Varient data handling but it's a royal pain to work with. Today, I would have written the whole thing in Perl - why now and not then? Company Standards (read: programmers can do what they want now to get the job done as quickly as possible).
Many years ago I worked at a Bank. One VP just bought an IBM XT. Another had the idea of offering mortgage borrowers accelerated payoff (they had low rate loans and the going rate was above 11%). They got together and low and behold, the XT could calculate the interest saved by accelerated payoff. So they come down to IT and request a 'blurb' on each statement telling the customers how much they'd save with early payoff. Well, a minor problem was the mainframe - a Burroughs medium system - had only 1 compiler that could handle it... Fortran. In the end I had to write 3 programs to accomplish it all because of data conversion and other limitations.
Sure, one could argue 'why not Java' or why not this or that. The why not is because the vast majority of 'coders' out there code in one maybe two languages. If C# provides the 'glue' to tie things together without worrying about the insane cross compiler/application issues, then by all means... where can I sign up to help
The accomplishments in my career we mostly based on doing things others didn't/couldn't do. I refer to this as 'glue' code - leveraging what's available to come up with a solution. Over the years, I've found enjoyment in coming up with these but the 'getting there' is becoming tiresome. It's always the same problem - this tool will do 75% of what I need but I have to write it in X because ____.
Miguel's letter really inspired me to look at things from a bigger picture. He pointed out what got him excited and how programmers can become movtivated and more productive - which I can always relate to.
M$ had a problem (well, a few) and came up with .NET as a solution... Miguel looked at it and saw application for his current (and future) set of problems and said 'why not'. As for me, I do multiple platforms and anything that will enable me to get a job done quicker the better.
- an incredible amount of the code is the 'table' widget, which is a monster do everything widget, made of literally dozens of classes. I wont say who started copying some windows/java tree widget to make that one
...
- a lot of it is dealing, no, fighting, with the awful gtk and gnome and bonobo api's and many of their problems.
- because of the large number of classes a bunch of it is just class definition overhead, which is just cut and paste and nothing to maintain anyway.
The mail client, including the complete standalone mail api is only about 150KLOC of code, definely under 200KLOC. It doesn't include the monster table widget, or the gtkhtml widget (which is by definition a big task), etc.We spend very little time fixing 'memory leaks' and 'wild pointers' - it is an insignificant amount of time compared to things like working around bugs in other clients and servers, and pandering to every users desirable feature (oh, and cloning outlook). Most of the other problems we have are fighting with ORBit's reentrancy and timing issues from idle handlers and threading issues (which mostly happen because of ORBits reentrancy issues and gtk nor ORBit being threadsafe).
To be honest, I have no idea where the rest of the lines of code come from. Some of the code is much tighter than other bits of it. And some of the code has to deal with messier interoperation than other bits too (e.g. ical, ldap, etc).
I'm sure we could redo it in a year too, knowing all we know now. And I bet the outlook team was 1. bigger, and 2. didn't have to write every thing they used (e.g. html component). The comparison is a dumb one.
FWIW i've only ever written 2 list routines (1 double linked the other single - actually the single list routines are so trivial its not even worth librarying them), and they keep getting re-used again and again, because they just plain work. C rules in my book. I found java quite a bit less productive because of limitations in the language C doesn't have.
Sun Tzu:
I would apply the corollary: "One hour of your enemy's time is worth twenty of your own." The principle is that you are not only getting your enemy's preparations and resources to work for your goals, but you also prevent him from using them against you. Your own resources are many times more costly to build up. Microsoft sees Miguel as a tool, and they are waging Ximian against Gnome (the GNU GUI) with the goal of making GNU oriented developers waste their time even learning C#.If we need a new language, why don't more people get together and decide on all the goals of that language? If we need to link compiled code from disparate languages together, why not write a CORBA spec or something? The key concept here is DO NOT LET MICROSOFT SLIP INTO YOUR PROJECT'S DEPENDANCIES.
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
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Miguel is outlining a road map for open source development of large projects, like Mono, Gnome and possibly others to come for the next 4 - 7 years. .NET framework on every possible Unix platform ...... .NET, CORBA, JAVA BEANS, whatever ... ....?! I hope so. Maybe Stallman has to pass on his hat.....
There's a well thought rationale a behind the outline, based not only well understood technical reasonings, but also socio-cultural thoughts and believes, which in the end gives us a coherent big picture of a possible road to the future for open source development. It boils down to the following points:
a. Microsoft has (finally!?) delivered a potential ly great technology, what the company intends to do with in terms of marketing and power game is altogether another story.
b. We can't always be defensive about Microsoft. Yes, we have to carefully watch them in terms of legal behavior, but we also can embrace them and take advantage of them... imagine a
c. Yes, we want to get rid of the mono cultural on desktop....., then we'll have real choice:
Visionary
Sometimes. IMHO this debate has become a silly excerse in hairsplitting and points of view.
When will you realize that Microshaft very rarely has a "NEW" idea?!?!?!?!?!
1) I did not claim they they had. "Borland did not do X" does not imply in any way that "X is Microsoft's idea".
2) Microsoft is a company. Companies do not have ideas. People do. Microsoft employs, truth be told, some of the best and brightest people that money can buy. Add it up. You and I may not like that but it is the truth. For instance, I have a lot of respect for Anders Hejlsberg, Archtect of Broland Turbo Pascal, Borland Delphi and Microsoft C#
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog