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KDE Adopting Mono
leandrod writes "The Register reports that members of KDE are committing to use and support mono, Ximian's independent .Net implementation. Not only does this provide KDE with some of the multilingual programmability it initially forfeited by its use of Qt, it also spells well for cross-desktop application and even KDE-Gnome desktop integration, because mono is developed by Gnome's most prominent ISV, Ximian, and is intended for Gnome integration." Update: 09/12 14:22 GMT by T : Actually, the Register story overstates things a bit, it seems. According to KDE developer Hetz Ben Hamo (heunique), "Yes, you can use QT# to write QT/KDE apps, but it doesn't mean that KDE will support mono. you can use kernel 2.4, but you can use any linux kernel or any other unix based OS." See also this comment from David Faure for more insight.
Wow this seems like a really good idea.
Confucious says: Man who runs behind car gets exhausted.
// jeku.com
What will happen when in a few years Microsoft discloses its licensing terms for .NET technologies, forcing the Mono team to either stop or pay vast sums of money - this will kill the two main Linux desktop environments, thus throttling most of Linux's desktop ambitions.
This is great news,
Linux is hampered by the lack of a well adopted COM(ish) model.
Now I can start wrapping my OOS up in a framework that I know will be usefull for everyone, and no more writing PHP modules, just instance through a generic mono wrapper. etc......
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
you know, it was a real hole in my life not to be able to run KDE and Gnome at the same time. guh.
w w w . m o n o l i n u x . c o m
I run Gnome desktop, but use kmail and other kde apps. I can even cut and paste between them. Seems to me the integration is already, to a large extent, there.
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Is it possible to make web applications with Mono that are served with Apache or something? And are their any GTK-C# bindings out yet?
Also, is anyone actually using Mono for any projects atm, or is it just a case of 'work in development' which will never be widely used anyway?
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
i am all for anythign that gives linux better apeal to the mainstream. hopefully this doesn't backfire.
Dewey 3:16
Once KDE has mono (and it will for months), it will become sluggish, weak, and completely addicted to bad daytime television. I advise staying away for a while, and don't share any of its apps.
- DDT
So long, michael. Don't let the door hit you...
But now the two great camps of UI development, KDE and Gnome have conspired together to merge their underlying implementations. This is a terrible thing because it reduces choice in the community. Furthermore, Mono is a reimplementation of .Net which makes Linux look like an also-ran.
I think KDE and Gnome should go in totally different, incompatible directions. That's the only way to maintain Linux solidarity.
The project will be move outside the US.... to somewhere where the IP cannot be inforced...{He dreams}
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
...Barrapunto: Mono y... KDE (Spanish)
I seems that the reg didn't check the facts since neither the Kde and mono project have any discusion about this on there mailling list.
The first thought that came to my mind was I18N. Only after having half read the article I realized this was about *programming* languages. And I'm even a programmer! :)
They should be more specific with their use of words...
Gustavo J.A.M. Carneiro
Maybe Gnome will adopt KOffice as it's office suite. The world is a changin...
-Jasa -- Linux - The SOURCE will be with you, ALWAYS
I wrote a small maintenence application, and compiled it targeting non-.NET Win32, the file was 19 meg.. ok, yeah, it's probably got the runtime in there... a similar java runtime is 7 or 8 meg.
KDE is also going to suffer from a similar rash of programmers like windows VB programmers who thing that dragging and dropping an application together makes them every bit as valuable as someone who can lovingly craft inline assembler into their C routines for speed and keep an eye on memory utilization. The dot.bomb shakeup was good for scaring those VB types out of the industry for a bit, but MS is still trying to sway focus over to "productivity" over stability or longevity.
Yeah i know i'm ranting, but i've got mana to burn.
The article states that QT is a programming language, when in fact it is a class-library...
Well, C# bindings for KDE would be great.
The language is pretty nice.
anyone else find it ironic that its microsoft technology that may finally enable integration between kde & gnome?
;-)
that bill gates... he's all about love, unity, and linux...
I hardly think that one of Bill Gates' children getting mono is news that should be posted on /.
Support Israeli punk bands. Man Alive.
Why not just standardize on java? It's crossplatform, more open that .net, larger developer base, more tools, etc...
I don't see anything really new about this story. It is simply mentioning Adam Treat's Qt# bindings and work on Mono integration. The Dot reported on this over a month ago.
The story makes the bombastic claim that KDE is switching to Mono as the underlying technology, and shows no proof to that extent. What is happening is that KDE guys are simply adding C#/Mono to the list of bindings Qt/KDE supports. Don't get too excited just yet.
Maybe they can adopt Palladium next. They should also copyright and patent KDE while they're at it.
The use of Qt has not been a problem in allowing the use of various languages to program for KDE. There are bindings for Python, Java, Objc-C, C, Perl, and interaction over XMLRPC and via command line tools for shell scripts. C# is just another one of the languages which can now program with the libraries, and presumably, so are any other Mono supported systems.
Interested readers may wish to checkout the KDEBindings package in CVS, which is part of the KDE desktop officially since 3.0. Web CVS
As a hardcore windows developer I find this to be great news. I have never liked coding for linux, mainly becvause it is just to much work to know all the APIs, infrastructure, etc... for both platforms.
I never was a big fan of java... Thats why I am really happy with this development. I can code for both platforms with only minor ui changes.
I think the linux community will find that being able to utilize the huge amount of application developers that windows has will be a large boon... Remember lack of good applications is what kept Mac from catching on, early on... DigitalCH
What a load of mis-information....
.NET or Mono at this point.
The Qt-C# / KDE-C# developer might be proud of his language bindings (undoubtly it's cool that those exist), but that's no reason to spread such wrong rumours. (I'm not accusing him, it could very well be the journalist from TheRegister who's making most of this up).
There is NO decision from the KDE project to do ANYTHING with C#,
It's amazing how much bullshit people can invent.
David, KDE/KOffice developer.
What about those nice new laws that have been brought in by the UN that effectively mean every single country on the planet may be held accountable to every other country's laws? Just because you don't live in the US doesn't mean that your IP is safe from their laws.
Reverse engineering is a fair use principle, but who cares about fair use these days when there's terrorists to fight? Once .NET is supported by more systems, they'll pull a few rugs from under us and say that they have to keep it all closed now because some terrorists might use it to breach national security.
Is there a good example why/how something like Mono/DotGNU helps using libraries written in/used from other programming languages?
How does one for example mix and match a program written in C# which uses the iconv C library and the Qt C++ library while using the Guile library to give the user a scheme scripting extension to the program.
I looked at the IK.VM.NET a DotNet Java implementation using GNU Classpath. You will see that there is a lot of work needed to make for example Java Exceptions work correctly with C# exceptions (Java exceptions are mostly checked, C# exceptions are never checked at compile time). And even simpler things as mixing the basic Sting classes or the IO library seem like it is non-trivial.
And C# and Java are really very much like each other. What about mixing more "exotic" languages like Logo and Scheme with Prolog or even basic C?
The DotNet runtime seems to support multiple language on top of it but it is not clear how that helps adapting libraries to multiple languages. It seems to me that you still have to write wrappers around every library to make it work with the way for example Strings, Dictonaries or other standard datastructures are represented/used in the different languages. It seems to me that mixing multiple languages will always be a challenge when programming.
In a nearby parallel universe on a website resembling slashdot, almost the whole KDE community was fuming about Miquel de Icaza and it's plans to adopt mono as backbone for Gnome. He was instantly promoted to righthand of the devil and the evil empire. Gnome should be banned from the free source world, dumped and forgotten for ever and ever, only because this idea was mentioned (but then again, almost every event in the Gnome world is a startsign for mindless bashing and FUD!). And know it seems that KDE will be faster in adopting this then Gnome. Wonder how quick the KDE community will forget this shamefull episode and how they will threat Miquel now? I Bet they will continu the bashing and still take the backbone.
Isn't it funny that a Gnome developing company (Ximian) might be the one who delivers the tool to let KDE grow and make it able to compete with Gnome in the future.
but what's the alternative? Windows XP?
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There is no Mono code in KDE cvs.
Repeat: There is no Mono code in KDE cvs.
The only Mono discussion on either kde-devel or kde-core-devel has been by the Mono developers plus some Ximian people, who were there due to the CCs from the Qt Mono announcements.
Nothing to see here. Please disperse.
I can't see any indications in the article of KDE adopting Mono, i.e. the C# language and the .NET framework class libraries. They are developing bindings of the C# language to Qt, which is a horse of a waaaaaay different colo(u)r.
This is an *excellent* sign, both of the ever-closer relationships of the GNOME and KDE people, and of good times ahead for coders. .NET/Mono is a great step forward for hackers like me who want to be able pick the right language for the job, rather than being forced to choose the language that happens to have the needed libraries.
On the other hand, it looks like the GNOME and KDE teams are poised on duplicating the same rift that currently exists between free GUI toolkits. Rather than standardize on either Windows Forms or a similar alternative API, both projects are porting their own toolkit APIs to C#, in the form of Gtk# and Qt#. Which means that developers will *still* have to commit to one toolkit or the other for a given project, because the APIs are totally different.
The opportunity GNOME and KDE have with this agreement is huge: write a unified GUI API equivalent to Windows Forms, with both Gtk and Qt backends. Let developers write to the single API, and let end users view the results rendered by whichever toolkit they prefer. Yes, it would be a lot of work. Yes, it would involve a lot of impedence matching. Yes, for some applications it would still be necessary to use the underlying toolkit for effects which have no equivalent on the other toolkit. But the gains in Open Source productivity would be huge - a prime source of unnecessary duplication of effort, the idea that every good application has to be written twice, once for KDE and once for GNOME, would finally be eliminated.
Take the opportunity guys - the community will be thanking you for years.
--
CPAN rules. - Guido van Rossum
It's not just opening up KDE to developer's unskilled in QT, as the article mentions.
.NET applications that WINE plays for win32.
It could (eventually) opening up the KDE desktop to applications written for the Microsoft Forms library. Mono, in a sense, would be playing a similar role to
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Well, Yeah.
NO ID: BEING FREE MEANS NOT HAVING TO PROVE IT
No one's insinuating that there's a great initiative within the KDE core ranks to adopt C#, except maybe the Slashdot headline (and really, you should take headlines for what they're worth). Read the article. What is suggested is how Qt# and KDE# can impact those wishing to develop interoperable software.
Also note that Qt# is in KDE's CVS repository, in kdebindings.
niko
Well some of those more 'exotic' languages are already being implemented with Mono. Like Logo for instance has 'MonoLogo' :-)
As far as mixing languages, it's quite easy. If you want to mix the libraries that you were referring to then there would have to be bindings for those libraries. But any library that Mono or DotGNU supports can be used by any language that Mono or DotGNU supports.
Instead of posting this bad journalism piece with an own invented misleading headline it would be better Slashdot wouldn't have rejected all submitted stories about KOffice 1.2. But it seems the moderator is a monkey.
Lets just get this clear: We're not working on .NET support. The Qt Sharp guys are. They are a seperate project and have no KDE CVS access. C++ will still be used for eons to come. Get used to it.
You mean you are ignoring this ?. I just read David Faure's comment. Is it me or this article is a troll ???
Is not the requirement for such a plan to have both robust Qt# and Gtk# implementations? Saying that KDE and Gnome are duplicating their existing riff because both are working on interfaces for their respective toolkits for mono is jumping to conclusions.
In fact, if you read the Winform plans document at the mono website, you will see that the plan is to support multiple back ends for System.Windows.Forms.
What's an ISV?
CfkRAp1041vYQVbFY1aIwA== RV/hBCLKKcSTP5UFK3kqsg==
Just give me icewm and I'm happy. Gnome and KDE are bloatware and add *nothing* to the desktop that a simple window manager doesn't. I don't need drag and drop bullshit when I have xterms.
Damn, it's enough to make a guy sick!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Having Mono be supported seems to effectively allow one to shortcut around this requirement. I could write a C# program that is based off of Mono and have it run on KDE just fine. What about the C# bindings for QT? Are they subject to the QPL also?
It seems that COBOL will be supported.
;).
My elderly relatives will be pleased - now they can be part of Open Source, too.
Come to think of it, if something's written in COBOL, it may as well be closed source
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
Ximian and I18n ... that's a sick Joke
Well Ximian had no hand in mono's I18n development. From what I heard it was developed by somebody called Rhys who has his own .NET project called Portable.Net ..
But looks like Miguel is making KDE swallow some Ximian droppings .. as well as try to stick KDE with some of their bloated compiler offerings
I've been hoping this .net thing would just die, and and technology would shift more and more to open standards. This is a far more important issue that free software imho.
Can anybody point me to a good discussion of this issue? It must have been discussed a lot when Mono was first announced.
Dang. My VB.Net binding is coming down the pike sooner than I thought. :-)
If someone gave me OOP Basic on KDE, I'd be writing all sorts of KDE apps. C# is a step in the right direction in terms of opening the field to develop for Linux.
Reach to the ignorant masses, and the ignorant masses will reach for you.
This space for rent.
What really happens is that for "far out" languages, the .net version loses a lot of its special features, where the special features don't fit the .net "vision" of sucky single-inheritance OO, refcounting GC, etc. For example, Eiffel# really sucks. Common Lisp# would be essentially pointless since it's "generic function" multiple-dispatch OO is totally different to Java-style OO, Scheme# just as pointless as the existing schemes-on-jvm.
geee I did not know kde was sick. who do you think gave it mono? migual?
[See subject]
--
CPAN rules. - Guido van Rossum
I really like QT/KDE, but I have to admit that one of QT's basic flaws is that it is tied to a simple one-owner memory management scheme. As a result the Python binding was a disaster - the binding had no way to prevent a QT object from being deallocated, so if you did certain things (like remove a widget from a window), you could easily segfault the interpreter.
It would be great to have a nice C# binding, but I don't see how one could feasibly interface QT with a garbage-collecting language. It's pretty much designed to be used from C++ only.
what competition ?
gnome will be far behind kde for the next... um... 100 years... with every month kde development gnome will loose 1 year.
That was one of the big reasons for me to use kde, everything else about kde alreaedy sucks. intergreated web browser, bah! Bloated and slow, bah! Intergreated .net framework, double bah!
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
Phonic is a cross-platform Vorbis player written for the GNOME desktop in C#. It was developed with and runs completely within the Mono .NET runtime environment. There was a Slashdot article mentioning it a few months back.
You're wrong. Desktop, above window manager, are not mainly intended for the user: it's for the developer. The main goal of a desktop environment is having a repository of components from wich to choose, and therefore making design of a new application just a mattern of putting together the pieces.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
but if you read it as sarcastic, he has a point. Choice is a good thing for command line apps etc., but having two semi-compatible desktops is not a good thing. If I were a Linux GUI developer, I'd be a bit pissed off in having to choose between two equally common desktop frameworks. Also, it's ridiculous that the user has to worry about a KDE control centre, a GNOME control centre and a $DISTRO control centre. And that you still can't cut and paste properly. And your font choices for KDE apps don't apply to GNOME (and probably sometimes don't work, leaving you looking at A.D. Mono). This kind of "choice" is not good for anyone, let alone novice users. I think it'd be good if one of them died, or they were both replaced by something better.
IANAL, but I'm pretty familiar with the LGPL and GPL and its technical stipulations. As .NET and thus Mono do linking at runtime, Trolltech licensing for Qt# should be unnecessary even for proprietary Qt# applications. Though this situation hasn't been widely recognised yet, I think it'll provide an argubly positive influx of proprietary Qt# applications, particularly on embedded systems like the Linux-based Sharp Zaurus.
If they DO pull that stunt, then the offending components are removed. Not great, but not a show stopper either..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The idea is:
Write Gtk# in C#, use it in C#, monoBasic, MonoLogo (!!!), Brainf*ck (!!!)... without the need to do a binding for each language. Just create gtk# once and it works for all languages.
It's best to think of .Net/Mono as *one* language - c#/vb.net/managed c++ all compile to the Intermedate Language (essentially assembler for the VM). So anything that has been compiled to IM will work with anything else compiled for the IM, but will need a wrapper to use native functionality.
Dream on!
feature bloat can not hide the area's where KDE is lacking. Now Gnome 2.0 ready and stable the pieces are falling together. We'll talk again in a half year, then you will understand what integration the *nix way means . Gnome is build on a foundation in the *nix spirit. Bonobo as the shell/pipeline equivalent for the desktop! Gnome doesn't deny its roots.
Look at the discussions in the gnome newsgroups at the moment. Example Nautilus (2.0.x) completely stripped from the bloat of its previous incarnation: not trying to be everything but do one thing very good namely: file browsing. In contrast with the first nautilus (1.0.x) the current wants to be only one thing. The rest wil be pipelined to applications who will do the one thing they do!
My prediction: I think the new file-selector will be a incarnation of nautilus.
I am pretty excited by the work that Adam has been doing with the Qt# bindings as well as the work of Mike and Rachel on the Gtk# bindings, they bring the toolkits to the .NET framework and to Mono.
.NET framework easily.
People building Gtk# apps and Qt# apps will be able to share components written for Mono and the
So even if Gnome and KDE can not share a lot of code currently because of the two divergining code bases, in the future we will be able to exchange code and chunks of it more easily.
For instance, Adam is working on a documentation system for Mono written in Qt# and some of his code will be reused for a web-based version of the documentation system, and perhaps a Gtk# version of the documentation system.
Miguel
You have to be kidding .Net is piece of crap. Further more do we want to implement a monopolistics M$ control feature in Linux. Here we go again Linux will need a patch every 20 mins when M$ .Net is implemented. By the way Bill Gates has already informed that Linux is Anti American ...
I think you are subject to international laws, so long at they are US American.
When asked to point out the USA on a globe 9/10 Americans will pick the blue bit.
the other 1/10 just picks the whole globe.
They repeatedly take a little piece of news, and try to infer some big story out of it.
A few years ago they posted a story that Microsoft had decided to cancel the Windows98 Second Edition project only a month or two before it's release.
What had actually happened was Microsoft had moved some of their programmers from the Win98 team to the Windows 2000 team.
Everyone else reported the programmers being moved, TheReg reported that Win98SE was cancelled.
They do this kind of thing all the time. Also they rarely list their sources, so when a story from TheReg is repeated at Slashdot or OSNews or wherever, it makes it impossible to check the authenticity of the story.
They are a tabloid. I wish everyone would just ignore them, or take everything they post with the pinch of salt it requires.
Next thing you know Slashdot will post links to stories in The Sun.
Update: 09/12 14:22 GMT by T: Actually, the Register story overstates things a bit, it seems...
I continue to wonder why people read that publication. Its like the Enquirer for the tech industry. Many of the articles are full of half truths and exaggerations. I think I can get more reliable information down at the pub.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
> KDE is also going to suffer from a similar rash of programmers like windows VB programmers who thing that dragging and dropping an application together makes them every bit as valuable as someone who can lovingly craft inline assembler into their C routines for speed and keep an eye on memory utilization...
Assuming for a moment that you have ever coded any assmembler (inlined in C or not), you fail to understand the difference between the value of the TOOL and the PERSON using it.
In your uninformed and narrow-minded world, a programmer's ability is merely a function of the language he or she uses to do a particular job.
VB is (or rather was, since VB.NET) a great (perhaps the greatest) tool for Rapid Application Development.
If only there was VB for Linux (don't get me going on Kylix 'coz it aint VB) then we'd have people writing a ton of great, usable apps - simply because you can do it quickly!
I've code in VB since V1.0. I also code in C, C++, various assemblers and a bunch of other scripting stuff and I have done so almost every day for more than 20 years.
There is a place for inlining assembler in C, but it is not appropriate business applications. For embedded systems, real-time systems, yes sure! but if you think of it as some sort of a holy grail then you are misguided and have spent too much time with the old hands that didn't catch on to the modern way of programming.
Programmer time is *much* more valuable than machine cycle time or memory. The fact that you haven't grasped this tells me that you're just a student or a wannabe, not a pro developer.
I'd prefer easily understandable/maintainable code over performance or efficiency any day. VB is (was - not sure about VB.NET) a great RAD tool. I've seen brilliant things done with it (and I've seen lots of attrocious shit done in C and ASM).
Learn that (the tool != the man).
I love GNOME, and really dislike KDE.
...committing to use and support mono, Ximian's...
That being said, this article summary was awfully slanted toward GNOME. Let's take a look at a couple of snippits:
some of the multilingual programmability it initially forfeited by its use of Qt
May we never see th
Look at a project like LyX. They were making great progress until they decided to have a unified GUI API. While they have been working on "GUI independence", very little improvements have been made to the actual application.
What I once considered of the most interesting applications is now spending all of development time on writing a GUI toolkit instead of improving the application.
Writing a unified API for a forms/graphics toolkit sounds great. What some people do not realize is that writing a unified API is really creating a third toolkit.
Check out this thread where Matthias Ettrich points that Netscape tried something similar with Navigator and failed and trying to make every happy makes no one happy.
A quote about users (not developers ) not wanting to use certain toolkits from Ettrich:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=36141&cid=3897 601
13 year old white supremacists are shitty web designers.
That's exactly why a unified graphics toolkit is important - so that application programmers can stop wasting their time reinventing one-use unified GUI toolkits. Let the toolkit programmers write a unified toolkit once, and let the application programmers write their apps once for all backends.
--
CPAN rules. - Guido van Rossum
The IBM Eclipse project SWT tries to rely on native widgets to the full expense possible. On Windows, it almost seems like
I got two questions. One, has anyone been able to download Eclipse, compile and run and sample applications? The Run dialog has too darn many options and it won't simply default to a standard configuration. I would say Eclipse with Java on Windows would be a good competitor to Visual Studio
Two, isn't Eclipse sorta what Microsoft got sued for -- tying Java into Windows by JNI'ing into the Windows API?
X11 wasn't designed with the mac-style copy&paste that windos was. The select&paste method is my favorite, and one of the few features that my iBook is missing in os x.
The fact that copy&paste works at all is amazing! From what I understand, it is written "through" X, rather than in it.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Quit smoking crap would you. Miguel has _never_ said that Mono participants are stealing MS 'intellectual property'. Exactly what 'intellectual property' do you think Mono is stealing?? How about some real examples??
Ximian has used freely available information to implement Mono and that has nothing to do with MS's 'intellectual property'
learn basic patent facts. uspo.gov (maybe uspto.gov)
There is a KDE Java binding, I wrote two of the example programs, during the time I worked on the thing. The last time I had a look at it the binding was quite well developed. It still had a few problems but it worked quite well. And there was no difference between a Java KDE program and one written in C++, neither at startup speed nor in gui speed. The problem I had was that the binding was not well supported by the distros. SuSE in 2-3 releases released the binding in a non working state, so I ended up most of the time to the the source release and compile it myself. I dont know how the situation is with other distros, but the binding deserves definitely more publicity, since it already is there and it works and it is the fastest way to make a KDE app currently available, and blending KDE with the huge J2SDK library is a killer thing, you can use the best of both worlds as long as you dont try to blend Swing with QT in a single window! So no reason to wait for Mono since you already can jump onto the KDE bandwagon if you want!
I mean, why would you want to name your software after a sexually transferable hard-to-cure disease? I know that's not the single meaning of mono, but it's the second thing that comes up in my head (after 1-channel thingys).
This is important information.
> but it still remains that any app on QT, and thus KDE, has to be either GPL'd or have a proper license for QT.
I think you misunderstand the GPL. Apps have to be under a GPL-compatible license. Most KDE apps are LGPL, BSD, X11, artistic, etc.. kdelibs itself is BSD licensed.
> I know that the bulk of the QT licensing problems have been resolved,
I think all of them have been resolved (Qt is GPL, after all).
Also, QT is Apple Quicktime. Qt is the toolkit from TT.
Fuck, I messed up my post.
:>
Instead of this:
Isn't it funny that a Gnome developing company (Ximian) might be the one who delivers the tool to let KDE grow and make it able to compete with Gnome in the future.
I should have written:
Isn't it funny that a Gnome developing company (Ximian) might be the one who delivers the tool to let KDE grow and make it able to compete with Microsoft in the future.
Gnome is dead anyways
I am not an IP expert, but i have seen the mono sources and the mailing lists, and they surelly ARE CONSTANTLY looking at the MS implementation, up to the degree of Miguel commenting in the changelog things like "change method X to assume enconding UTF-8, as this is what the MS implementation does". It may be legal, but there are so much comments like that that it's probably a reality one will infringe.
unfinished: (adj.)
I must admit, I am on the other end. I have seen so many stupid f.. designs that I could not appreciate the business knowledge. I would rather pick someone smart than someone with business knowledge who's willing to learn the business. My motto is never hire a boy to do the man's job. If you don't know how to code, the program could be compliant but it would not be maintainable. Now you might say what about new projects, .. umm most development is about maintenance and not about writing new stuff. I would throw number 2 guy out the door since I have met with some and I don't have good memories in trying to teach them modular programming/debuggability, documentation. No my MS guys sucked in documenting and they guarded their program as if it is the secret to immortal life. Now I wonder why your CS guy spent so much time, is it possible that you asked for it and didnot provide specs. I have been showeled into projects where users thought about the feature being implemented less than I did so... pls spare me crap. I don't want a MS maintaing my car and I don't want an MS writing code.