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Another .NET Language
Wankers Anonymous writes "In an interview with David Simmons, CTO of SmallScript Corp., Learn about a new .NET language about to debut, the ins and outs of its creation, as well as some insider history behind the genesis of the .NET platform. "
that was only posted two days ago....
This note was originally published at John Munsch weblog on January the 14th.
.NET to fail and fail badly
.NET "rebuttal" that I linked to above, "For non-profit use VS.NET can be had pretty cheaply, especially if you know anyone that is in college somewhere." Pretty cheaply? For a non-profit (that means charities, churches, universities, the hobbiest who is going to give away his work for FREE)... pretty cheaply? Wow. That is well and truly pathetic. To try and justify it, and say, oh well, you can try to scam an educational discount so it won't be so dear, is even more pathetic.
.NET commercials with William H. Gacy telling you how great it is without really ever telling you anything about it? Microsoft doesn't trust .NET to stand on its own technical merits and it knows it may go like cod-liver oil down the gullets of a lot of people who have seen how the company works behind closed doors even if it were the tech shiznit.
.NET just in case there wasn't any grassroots community who actually wanted to do it. Or maybe just in case there was and they couldn't control it.
.NET for other platforms? If those same people were working on giving us new libraries and new tools for an already existing language instead of pouring in the thousands of man hours it's going to take to build a copy of the C# compiler or a .NET version of Ant and JUnit?
Lots of reasons why I want
It's benefits a criminal organization. Not one that's been found guilty of crimes once or maybe twice, but lots and lots of times. Those crimes are many and varied, but here's just a few of them: Stac Electronics v. Microsoft, DOJ v. Microsoft, Sun v. Microsoft.
P.S. If you want to split hairs, Stac v. Microsoft isn't a criminal action, it's doesn't stem from a criminal abuse of their monopoly like the other two cases. Instead it was just a case of a small company being driven out of business by willful patent infringement, theft of trade secrets, etc.
Microsoft isn't just one thing anymore. It's too damn big for that. I'm sure even Bill himself knows better than to think that he truly controls the whole ship because it's become big enough that he can't possibly know all the projects, people, etc. anymore. But even a really large company still has a kind of collective personality that it exudes and a large part of the personality both internal and external to Microsoft for many years now is that of a total control freak.
If they don't own it, if they don't control it, if they didn't create it, if it doesn't have a broad stamp from Microsoft on it, then they don't want it. Sometimes it's sufficient for the thing to merely exist and they'll refuse to acknowledge it, other times they need to actively stamp it out because they can't control it.
When was the last time you can remember Microsoft saying they supported a standard? That is, not something they invented and submitted a RFC for, an actual, take it off the shelf and re-implement it without renaming it or "improving" it so it doesn't work with anybody else standard. C++? Basic? HTML? A video or audio codec? Java? Anything?
I'm sure there's something, somebody will point out their excellent support for TCP/IP or something and I'm sure that's true. But if you were to look at Microsoft as a person in your life, you'd wonder what was wrong with him or her such that so much had to be controlled by that person.
When your business is selling the operating systems that 90+% of everybody uses, software development tools should not be a profit center.
Why should I have to plunk down a couple of thousand dollars for a "universal subscription" in order to have access to compilers and basic development information? Sun doesn't have to do that? On this point I'll quote from the
Marketing. Have you been "lucky" enough to catch one of the
So they are going to pull a page out of Intel's bum-bum-buh-bum "Intel Inside" playbook and try to sell the brand like it's sneakers and cola. Trust us, you'll look cool if you use it, and we'll keep hammering the brand on TV so somebody who doesn't have much tech savvy in your organization will ask you if you are using it, or have plans to port to it, or whatever, even if he hasn't got a clue what "it" is in this case.
They don't trust you. They don't like what they can't control and they can't control you. They can try and they always will keep trying but ultimately you are going to see them keep trying to do things and always keep a step towards the door just so they can bolt if they have to. Want to see what I mean? Go visit GotDotNet sometime if you haven't already been there. It's the grassroots community website that Microsoft put up to support
Ever been to SourceForge? Of course you have, everybody has because that's one of the hubs of all open source projects. You can go there and get the source of thousands of cool open source projects and it really serves the community well. There's even hundreds of projects now that list C# among their programming languages. So why did Microsoft feel compelled to create their own GotDotNet Workspaces that is clearly just a ripoff of SourceForge?
A few reasons are fairly clear: First, at many of their workspaces you don't get in unless they know who you are. Ever been stopped at SourceForge and asked for a name and password to look at a project? What about download binaries or source? No? At GotDotNet you will, lots of projects are marked with a lock. Second, forget about all those messy licenses that Microsoft might not approve of, you don't need to worry your little head about BSD vs. GPL vs. LGPL. You've got the one true workspace license that you have to agree to, or else you won't be putting your project there. Lastly, well it's kind of obvious, but it's really all about control isn't it. After all, if you aren't under their thumb, that has to be a bad thing. So a SourceForge that they control is pretty much a requirement, isn't it?
It's a really sad way for a lot of people to waste a whole lot of time rebuilding that which already exists. Wouldn't the whole computing world be a lot better if there wasn't a team of people, maybe a couple of teams of people building complete copies of
In the end, we'll all just be left with another way to do the exact same thing only in a different language. Lord knows the world benefits now from being unable to share media between France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the US, and Japan because we can't all speak the same language. I benefit every day from the fact that I can't read a Japanese manga I might enjoy or understand a TV show from Europe. Once you are done building this tower, go build a few more right beside it using Perl, Python, and Ruby too. They're all trailing behind in certain areas, we need to make sure the same set of stuff is reinvented and rewritten for all of them too.
"brought to you by project fail.NET"
In MicroSoft Marketing speek shouldn't that be:
"The Fail.NET Initiative"
good work
'Be the change you want to see in the world' - Al Gore
Steve Balmer : "Hey CmdrTaco, could ya run a couple of stories on .NET every couple of days - don't worry whats in them - our astroturfers will see to the rest - those *developers* will get the message .NET is great
CmdrTaco : "whats in it for us"
Balmer : "Advertising $$$$$$$"
CmdrTaco : "Sure thing steve " [aside] "We'll just post random boring stories and dupes - who'll care"
Balmer : [aside] " developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers......."
vote Fail.Net
when VA Linux fires all the slashdot lackeys (Q2 '03), Hemos will be assistant manager of all the janitors at the local burger king.
LOL, but I happen to know Bill gates has already promised Hemos a high power position at the gotDotNET site in exchange for posting this story a 2nd time
...to see my name on Slashdot for the second time in a week.
David Simmons
(the one not associated with SmallScript Corp.)
Let's keep them all with the original, only two-day-old posting of this same story, here. No point in getting useful comments scattered across two stories. Cool slashcode idea - track stories seen, and extend expiration to some configurable value for unseen ones. It still won't avoid the 3 hour old dupes we sometimes see (if they don't read it at all, nothing can help), but it might make it easier for the editors to catch the forgivable dupes like this one.
Whew!
:
.net is like so great coz i can use like 15 languages.. beep beep beeeeep, bummer"
ok i looked back on some of your previous posts... you seem to exist just to jump into a discussion and fight Microsofts corner. The moderators are free to look at you posts and reach the same conclusion.
The real give away however is that this is a dupe story and YOU ALREADY PARTICIPATED IN THE PREVIOUS DISCUSSION AND SAID EXACTLY THE SAME SORT OF THING
"oh my god, praise jeeeeezus!
Any genuine slashdotter would just have complained about the dupe!
BTW java has support for over 160 languages, 158 of which were developed independantly of Sun.
+5 informative I feel
...heres a link to last weeks version...
dupe.NET
Unfortunately, no one can be told what my sig is...
...I think I'd base it on the .Net framework or the Java framework. My preference would be .Net because of the genuine interest MS is taking in making it a good platform for lots of languages and the fact that, if it fit my language adequately, I'd get all those libraries, GC and other services, ASP.Net, ADO.Net, etc., all for free.
However, the genuine interest Sun has taken in making the Java runtime available for lots of *platforms* is pretty attractive, too. If the Mono Project doesn't make it, I'd have to go with Java, but I think Mono will eventually have pretty good coverage of the platforms of interest to me.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."