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Mono Progress In the Past Year
Eugenia writes "OSNews posted an article accounting the applications created in GTK# the past 8 months, since the release of Mono 1.0. While many of them are still in their infancy, it's clear that the platform had a healthy progress, with 'super-hits' like Tomboy, F-spot, MonoDevelop, Muine & Blam! and other, less known gems, like SportsTracker, PolarViewer, MooTag, GFax, GIB, Sonance and Bluefunk. The 2.0 version of Mono is expected around May, but the developers advised distros and users to upgrade to Mono 1.1.4 despite being a beta."
Right. So by that logic, you can write OO code in machine language. (Which you can't, by the by; no processor on the market today has a "frob this object" command in its opcodes.)
I wonder when this "OO is just a style" meme will die. Guys, we have different computer languages because machine language is icky. (Have you ever hand-hacked applications using debug.exe? I have. I didn't like it and I'm not going back.)
In order to guard our precious sanity from the frozen wasteland that is raw machine language, we've invented formal languages in which it's possible to describe mathematical constructs in terms of various different metaphors. PROLOG uses pure mathematical logic as a way of approaching the problem domain. Instead of raw 1s and 0s, we escape from it altogether and we get to think in terms of bindings and clauses. (Variables? What are those? Functions? Don't need 'em.)
LISP uses set theory to do the same thing. Learn set theory in and out and you'll discover interesting niches of LISP, and come to appreciate its alien beauty.
What's C? C's a portable Assembler that's been kludged up over the years. That's not an insult--sometimes what you want is a portable Assembler with 30 years of hacks on the side, because those hacks are what give it such power. The C language is designed in such a way as to make kludgy hacks easy to write, which is sometimes a great strength.
The languages we use lend themselves, quite directly, to how we think about problems and how we decide to solve them. As such, it makes absolutely no sense to say "well, you can do OO in any language." Sure you can. All Turing-complete languages are equivalent. But at that point, why don't you go back to machine code? That's Turing-complete, too.
When you've bled from your eyeballs on the raw binary, then come back to languages. Discover what each one brings to the table. Discover where they're superior and where they're inferior. You might discover a lot of new things along the way.