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Mono Poises to Take Over the Linux Desktop
Edd Dumbill writes "Miguel de Icaza and the Mono team recently hosted a two day open meeting in Boston. O'Reilly have just published
my report of the meeting. Highlights include
Miguel's view that 'C is dead!' and the Mono approach
to dealing with Microsoft patents on .NET."
Doesn't the Monodevelop IDE look suspiciously like Eclipse?
.NET is good because it takes the best from languages that are already in existence. It's not like there is anything revolutionary in C# that isn't in any other language out there. I used to be stuck in this PC-centric view of the world. Imagine my surprise when I bought a Mac and realized that NeXT had fantastic things like Internet-enabled Distributed Objects available long before much of the world even knew what a web browser was. Yes, C# is good. But the only people that I know that have been blown away by it are those that didn't stray far from Microsoft solutions and were never exposed to tools available from other vendors. Welcome to what much of the rest of the world had available to them in the form of Java since the late 1990s. And before the fanboys come out - yes I know that C# actually improves on some of Java's deficiencies. But I do take issue with the assertion that C# was made possible thanks only in part to a concerted MS R&D effort. It wasn't.
IMO, I think Parrot will become the .NET equivalent in the open source world: a language independent VM and a huge standard library. I can't wait to have access to CPAN from my Python programs.
Sure, C# is a lot nicer than C, but Python & Ruby are a lot nicer than C#. If you're going to give up the predictability of C/C++ for a VM, garbage collection, et cetera, why not go all the way up to dynamic execution?
Bryan
don't bother mentioning .NET community sites that host on .NET or Match.com. Those aren't transaction heavy or trading systems. Glorified webpages that serve up database tables are simple. A decent developer can build it. Building a transaction application that can handle 500-1000 moderately complex transactions (update/insert) per second is hard. .NET can't handle it, or atleast I all the cases I've heard of in the financial industry failed miserably. If you're in this industry you already know. If you're not, you're probably saying "what bs, .net can scale just as well."
Yeah, try to build one in .NET and tell me how many servers you're going to need. then tell me how you would run real-time analytics on all the rows in a given table when you've partitioned the table across 8 machines and each has 8 million rows. When the CTO says, the query has to take less than 30 seconds, what will your answer be?
Indeed. Since most damned operating systems are written in C I don't think we'll exactly see it go away anytime soon.
Operating systems is where C comes from, and vice versa.
(Yeah, whatever, I'm a C geek. To me, and array of pointers to functions returning pointers to arrays of characters seems like a damned fine idea! =)
Back in my day, we jusy wrote straight to the registers on the device and we were glad! Damned punk kids.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
But as it is I see the tremendous duplication of effort across the world to do the same things in Java and C#, and it just makes me sad.
.Net or Java runtime and is a far more advanced language than C# or Java.
I think this problem would be solved by writing things in Scala. Scala compiles to
Hmm.
The initiative it takes to back-engineer the
The whole idea of chasing after a proprietary standard like
If Microsoft doesn't want the
Unfortunately, Miguel seems to have a fairly long track record with this sort of Microsoft-chasing. You can run along and play catch-up all you like with other technologies, but, it'll be just like it is with Gnome ---- With Gnome, you're guaranteed nothing better than a perpetual second place finish. Gnome amounts to a Windows wanna-be, instead of a Windows-killer, when it didn't have to be that way. Miguel made it that way.
Look...If you HAVE the talent to do something better, for God's sake, do it. Don't waste your time (and other peoples time) churning out flea market knock-offs of worthwhile products. I'm certainly no fan of Microsoft..I just call it like I see it.
Bowie J. Poag
We have Gnome because Trolltech refused to release QT under a free license in the early years.
The prevalence of KDE at that time showed us that a large proportion of the F/OSS community would cave to non-free software if it was convenient.
Until recently a mutually beneficial relationship existed between Gnome in the community and Ximian as a commercial provider, analogous to the relationship that exists between OpenOffice.org and Sun's Star Office.
Now that Novell owns Ximian (OK Novell are currently our friend, but that may not always be the case) and Miguel is exposing the community to litigation from Micro-Soft down the track through the introduction of non-free technologies (and procedures, methods, etc. which are likely to be covered by upcoming patent laws) the GNOME project needs to distance itself from the disruption that the Ximian guys represent in order to avoid contamination.
Miguel has a solid reputation and has done a lot for the community, but in this case he is either (best case) a fool for thinking that Micro-Soft can be trusted or (worst case) a quisling. Either way, it's barge pole time.
"There is no support for some Python features that some programs will require. Most of these are
fairly obscure, but are a limitation. Examples include:
- String formatting
- Core language features, such as long integers, complex numbers, built-in object methods
and so forth.
- The standard Python library."
Are they joking?
The more I try to hire good C++ programmers, the more I become a c++hating bigot.
When over 95% of "C++ programmers" that I interview can't even answer this: straightforward question about virtual methods, I see no hope for the language. It seems most people who claim to be C++ programmers just say that because they use a C++ compiler and stick their functions in objects.
The future I expect is a mix of a higher-level language (Java, C#, perhaps even Python) and C. I can think of cases where C is the right tool for the job (small memory embedded systems), and I can think of cases where Java/C# is (large scale enterprise software); but I don't see C++ as the right tool for either job.
There is almost no difference between C#/Mono/.NET and Java, but almost no Linux developers write in Java.
.Net will evolve too quickly for Mono to keep up. Only in that case it is guaranteed MS will deliberatly include things that will break Mono.
.Net clone, when they are done with that they can concentrate on the single remaining target.
Not quite true. Current Sourceforge statistics by language:
1. C++ (12967 projects)
2. C (12955 projects)
3. Java (11446 projects)
4. PHP (8607 projects)
5. Perl (5388 projects)
There is a vocal group of Java haters on Slashdot.
There is a bigger group who is a bit wary because even though the Java Community Project exist and IBM and others are allowed to develop their own implementations, the licence is not GPL and Sun could screw things up if they turn evil or desperate.
Check out your distribution's packages and you'll almost see more JVMs than Java apps.
Yes, because lincence restrictions prevent them from including Suns java. The open source packages are not mature enough to run all apps, so it's pointless to include those apps. The open source implementations of the VM are impressive, but the java standard is developing too quickly for them to keep up porting all libraries. Just like
there's every reason to use Java, especially for applications.
Yes, and I believe a huge reason for the upswing of Linux in businesses is the great combination of Linux and Java.
Do NOT help Microsoft kill off Java with their
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
but, really, there aren't that many of those. here's a statement you can argue about:
"usage of c and it's derivatives (c++, objective-c) is more likely create buggy and insecure software. the performance gains from these languages does not make up for this loss of stability"
seriously. direct memory management is a dangerous thing and isn't necessary for 90% of the software written in c-like languages. if you're writing device drivers or an os or whatever, it's important... but does sendmail really need to be written in c?
would it be more secure if it wasn't?
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