Reasons To Use Mono For Linux Development

Nerval's Lobster writes: In the eleven years since Mono first appeared, the Linux community has regarded it with suspicion. Because Mono is basically a free, open-source implementation of Microsoft's .NET framework, some developers feared that Microsoft would eventually launch a patent war that could harm many in the open-source community. But there are some good reasons for using Mono, developer David Bolton argues in a new blog posting. Chief among them is MonoDevelop, which he claims is an excellent IDE; it's cross-platform abilities; and its utility as a game-development platform. That might not ease everybody's concerns (and some people really don't like how Xamarin has basically commercialized Mono as an iOS/Android development platform), but it's maybe enough for some people to take another look at the platform.

Comments

If there are patent issues

[fustakrakich]

You just shouldn't bother. It's not worth the risk.

Re: If there are patent issues

[Anonymous Coward]

By this time (w/ MS deliberately contributing to Mono no less) estoppel should quash any patent claims.

Re:If there are patent issues

[naasking]

There are patent issues with every technology.

Re: If there are patent issues

[Gravis Zero]

By this time (w/ MS deliberately contributing to Mono no less) estoppel should quash any patent claims.

it's a good thing proving that in court is inexpensive and that they have a moral integrity to not use their vast army of lawyers to just bleed you until you cannot afford to defend yourself.

oh wait.

Re:If there are patent issues

[Gravis Zero]

There are patent issues with every technology.

there are no patents on C++ and even if there were they would have expired by now.

Re:If there are patent issues

[Anonymous Coward]

It's like the programming language equivalent of trans-fats.

Re:If there are patent issues

[viperidaenz]

You'd better check that what ever compiler you're using doesn't violate any patents either.
Or any 3rd party libraries.
Or any of the code you're writing.

Re:If there are patent issues

[Anonymous Coward]

that's why us greybeards don't release anything we develop

Re: If there are patent issues

[exomondo]

By this time (w/ MS deliberately contributing to Mono no less) estoppel should quash any patent claims.

it's a good thing proving that in court is inexpensive and that they have a moral integrity to not use their vast army of lawyers to just bleed you until you cannot afford to defend yourself.

oh wait.

This is exactly the sort of thing that the EFF would be all over, moreover it wouldn't even be an issue of the validity of patents - which often results in drawn-out litigation - but of the legal principle of promissory estoppel.

If you're worried about being sued by a company over patent claims of merit-less basis just because they have more money than you then why are you using any technology at all? If you were genuinely worried about this issue you wouldn't be in the industry at all because anybody with more money than you can just say they have a patent on what you've created and bleed you dry in court.

Re: If there are patent issues

[jhoger]

Except it's not a shitty language. WTF are you talking about? It's basically a better Java. And it has some innovative stuff like LINQ.

Re: If there are patent issues

[Anonymous Coward]

Best not use StackOverlow then. You wouldn't want to visit a low performing website written in a shitty language.

Re: If there are patent issues

[Anonymous Coward]

"Better Java" is like a chocolate teapot being marginally preferable to one made of butter.

Re:If there are patent issues

[Dutch Gun]

Patent issues? What would Microsoft have to gain by suing someone for using their own technology? That makes about as much sense as Oracle suing a developer for using Java. It's an utterly nonsensical argument, as Microsoft is officially and releasing .NET as open source, and has indicated their support of Mono and Xamarin as well.

Personally, I feel a lot better when I understand a company's motivation. As far as I can figure, Microsoft is interested in keeping Windows relevant, and they can help do this by ensuring developers can use Windows as a development springboard for targeting other platforms. This keeps those developers in the Microsoft ecosystem, even if they have to acknowledge that fewer people are living in a Windows-only world - *especially* in mobile. The alternative would be that developers would have to turn to other development tools on other platforms, and they might find another cross platform solution that leaves Windows as an "also-ran", marginalizing it as a development platform, which in turn might lead to the erosion of Windows as a *user* platform.

Microsoft has always been fairly smart about courting developers with excellent tools and development platforms, and making it quite easy to build applications for Windows. As far as I can tell, this is no different - it's just that Microsoft has finally acknowledged that open source and multi-platform development is critical in today's world, and they're going their best now to play catch-up in this field. This doesn't suddenly make them nice guys, but it's not in their business interest to start attacking developers - the people that they're actively trying to court with these latest strategies.

Re: If there are patent issues

[Anonymous Coward]

Well yeah, you can eat the chocolate one. Who eats raw butter?

Re: If there are patent issues

[exomondo]

Yeah ok then.

Re: If there are patent issues

[cavreader]

There are no "shitty languages and implementations" only shitty developers and those trying to implement the shitty applications creations by those developers.

Re:If there are patent issues

[jd2112]

There are patent issues with every technology.

there are no patents on C++ and even if there were they would have expired by now.

None of which will prevent some unscrupulous parties from patenting decades-old technologies with our wonderful approve-happy patent office meaning you can spend a shitload of money licensing bogus patents or several shitloads of money fighting it in court.

Re: If there are patent issues

[Anonymous Coward]

because anybody with more money than you can just say they have a patent on what you've created and bleed you dry in court.

That is kinda how the system works, yaknow.

Re: If there are patent issues

[Anonymous Coward]

I eat my butter melted into a puddle with tea, thankyouverymuch.

Re:If there are patent issues

[mcrbids]

Microsoft has always been fairly smart about courting developers with excellent tools and development platforms, and making it quite easy to build applications for Windows

Maybe you don't remember history the way I do.

Remember VB? An excellent toolkit that gained widespread acceptance in the Enterprise world for it's tight IDE, integration environment and easy forms. But then MS came out with VB.net which was about as related to VB 6 as javascript is to java. It was a horrible mess, everything had to be re-written to be compatible because it was really an entirely new language. Developers were left in the lurch, oh well, perhaps you shouldn'ta Microsoft, you know?

Remember Silverlight? The "Flash Killer", it was an excellent toolkit for writing distributed applications quickly. Performance was excellent. Many big names "bet the farm" on it. Until Microsoft walked away from it, too. Netflix will *never again* bank on a MS technology, I'm sure.

But that's not where it ends. Remember Windows Phone 7? The next big thing (tm) and they ditched it, for WP8, and all the devs were screwed. Again.

But that's not where it ends. Why is the XBox 360 not compatible with the original XBox? Why is the XBox "One" not compatible with the XBox 360? With every console generation, MS has been screwing the developers.

And so it goes. Over and over, the devs get the shaft any time they bet on Microsoft's newest, highly promoted technology.

What's next?

Re: If there are patent issues

[Gr8Apes]

Yep, a simple lookup engine and 2 forms. There's a shining example. I've seen more complex software written in a bar.

Re: If there are patent issues

[Anonymous Coward]

They're actually going to let Xbox 360 games run on Xbox One I hear.

Re: If there are patent issues

[benjymouse]

LINQ is the PHP for those who can't design proper data architecture and access layers.

I have a suspicion that you have no idea what LINQ is.

Re:If there are patent issues

[jcr]

Oh, is that why? I thought I was just being lazy about uploading anything to share it.

-jcr

Re: If there are patent issues

[ardave8952]

I have a *certainty* the person has no idea what LINQ is.

Re: If there are patent issues

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a reason C# isn't used for writing windows. Hint: It's not because it's "great".

So the greatest language is whatever Windows is written in and every language is shit unless it was used to write an operating system.

Re:If there are patent issues

[jopsen]

afaik MS has a patent licensing scheme to other .Net implemetations... Has been in place for decades... Look it up... I don't remember the details...
Eitherway, I suspect you're more likely to be sued by Oracle and suddenly have MS helping you because they want a different precedence...

Re:If there are patent issues

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember Silverlight? The "Flash Killer", it was an excellent toolkit for writing distributed applications quickly. Performance was excellent. Many big names "bet the farm" on it. Until Microsoft walked away from it, too.

In favor of HTML5. Its funny how the tables turn as soon as Microsoft does something, now pushing open standards in favor of proprietary blobs is a bad thing. They pushed Silverlight until HTML5 was capable then stopped supporting it and released it as open source.

Remember Windows Phone 7? The next big thing (tm) and they ditched it, for WP8, and all the devs were screwed. Again.

Please explain why you believe "devs were screwed", here is the experience documented by an actual dev.

Why is the XBox 360 not compatible with the original XBox?

Because the 360 has a completely different architecture to the original. This is not something new in the console world, developers want to write games specifically tailored to the hardware using architecture-specific strategies. The hardware improvement between the consoles was not enough to fully emulate the original XBox hardware in software on the new console.

Why is the XBox "One" not compatible with the XBox 360?

For the same reasons as above, however they have manage to get enough performance out of an emulation layer of sorts to be able to do backwards compatibility, it just requires the permission of the developer for distribution reasons. This is made easier since much of the games of today rely on GPU programming and while the GPU architecture is improved in the more recent console it has an AMD chip that shares many of the underlying subtleties with the AMD GPU used in its predecessor.

With every console generation, MS has been screwing the developers.

If you write software that depends on specific hardware obviously you can't expect that software to work when the hardware is different...duh!

Re:If there are patent issues

[bondsbw]

Remember VB? . . . But then MS came out with VB.net . . . it was really an entirely new language.

You mean, the better language capable of running on the .NET CLR and utilizing the same set of proven, well-tested libraries available for all .NET languages? Getting that with a very low learning curve for existing VB developers?

Remember that VB 6 never actually died. It just stopped being improved. If you moved your app from VB 6 to VB.NET, that was your own choice for your own reasons... but let's be clear, it wasn't because suddenly your app stopped working or you couldn't maintain it.

Remember Silverlight? The "Flash Killer"

Actually HTML5, with the iPhone as a catalyst, killed both Flash and Silverlight. It's interesting that you don't blame Adobe for killing Flash as you blame Microsoft for killing Silverlight.

Remember Windows Phone 7? The next big thing (tm) and they ditched it, for WP8, and all the devs were screwed.

Most WP7 apps could run just fine on WP8. And the changes from WP7 to WP8 were relatively minor; same language, updated (but not completely backwards compatible) APIs.

Why is the XBox 360 not compatible with the original XBox? Why is the XBox "One" not compatible with the XBox 360?

Because the architectures were different between original XBox and the 360, and between the 360 and Xbox One. By definition the only way to achieve binary compatibility is through virtualization, which is exactly what Microsoft has done in both cases.

Re:If there are patent issues

[Dutch Gun]

I'm not defending Microsoft, nor justifying all their mistakes or missteps. I said they've *courted* developers, not always treated them perfectly. Do you know you can be immune from issues like that? Don't always go chasing after the newest, greatest technology, no matter how sparkling fresh and cool the MS evangelists make it sound. Maybe it's best to stick with tried and true for a while if you're betting your whole business on something.

.NET is not a new thing at this point. It's been around for over a decade now, and it's pretty obviously it's going to hang around for a few more decades. In fact, thanks to Mono, it's actually out of Microsoft's hands whether they want to continue supporting it or not, because they don't *control* Mono. For people that have been burned by Microsoft abandoning support for products, they should feel a lot safer with Mono, I'd think.

Re:If there are patent issues

[Anonymous Coward]

> Remember Windows Phone 7? The next big thing (tm) and they ditched it, for WP8, and all the devs were screwed. Again.

Yes just look at how screwed the were!

Re: If there are patent issues

[Dutch Gun]

A "shitty language"? Which language would that be? C#, Basic, F#, IronPython, COBOL, Perl, Java, Scala, Boo...?

Re:If there are patent issues

[phantomfive]

You mean, the better language capable of running on the .NET CLR and utilizing the same set of proven, well-tested libraries available for all .NET languages? Getting that with a very low learning curve for existing VB developers?

You utterly failed to respond to his point. The only question is whether you ignored it, or didn't understand it in the first place.

Just in case you're not a troll, and you want to understand his point, here is the same thing restated. For your convenience, here is a relevant quote:

If you spend the money to upgrade to VB.NET, well, you just spent a lot of money to stand still. And companies don't like to spend a lot of money to stand still, so while you're spending the money, it probably makes sense to consider the alternatives that you can port to that won't put you at the mercy of a single vendor and won't be as likely to change arbitrarily in the future. So as soon as people with large code bases start hearing that they're going to have to work to port their apps from VB to VB.NET with WinForms, and then they start hearing that WinForms isn't really the future, the future is really this Avalon thing nobody has yet, they start wondering whether it isn't time to find another development platform.

That's why people stay away from Microsoft platforms.

Re:If there are patent issues

[phantomfive]

.NET is not a new thing at this point. It's been around for over a decade now,

Visual Basic had been around for a decade when it was abandoned.

Re:If there are patent issues

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle did sue Google for using Java.

Re:If there are patent issues

[Dutch Gun]

Anyone who thinks .NET is in danger of being abandoned is delusional. It's a core technology for MS at this point, and there's about as much chance of it being abandoned as the Windows API being abandoned. The fact that MS is actively promoting .NET as a cross-platform solution would also argue against the notion that it will be abandoned in the foreseeable future.

I get your point, but Visual Basic and the .NET platform aren't even in the same league.

Re: If there are patent issues

[shutdown -p now]

LINQ is just sequence comprehensions combined with a very primitive form of AST-based "macros" (quoted because they're actually runtime). The latter is occasionally useful though not a proper substitute for true macros; the former is a hallmark of any sane language designed in the past 20 years.

Re:If there are patent issues

[phantomfive]

I get your point, but Visual Basic and the .NET platform aren't even in the same league.

Unless you were one of those companies who spent millions of dollars building VB software. If there's a change in wind, a change in management, whatever.....Microsoft will abandon .net. As mcrbids showed, they've done it multiple times throughout their history.

I get the feeling that you rather don't want Microsoft to abandon .net, rather than having any kind of solid reasoning for it. Microsoft abandons technology. It's a thing they do. (And that's just addressing the overall platform, pieces can go away quicker. How much longer do you think asp.net will be around?)

Re:If there are patent issues

[shutdown -p now]

And which of those that you've listed were open source, under a license that enables anyone to fork and continue developing them if they so wish?

Re:If there are patent issues

[shutdown -p now]

The brand, yes. The language, not so much. VB3 -> VB4 was a huge breaking transition in just as many respects as VB6 -> VB.NET, and that was in 1995. VB4 -> VB5 was also breaking in quite a few things, largely because of Win16->Win32 move; and that was in 1997. VB6, the last version, was in 1998.

So at most it was around for 3 years if you count VB4.

Most importantly, large chunks of .NET are now open source, including pretty much all of the web/server stack. It won't go away even if Microsoft were to drop it.

Re:If there are patent issues

[shutdown -p now]

It's not a patent licensing scheme, it's a disclaimer, which basically says that MS won't sue you for patents pertaining to the CLR if you implement the CLI spec.

Re:If there are patent issues

[Anonymous Coward]

M$ knows they need to innovate. At least they need to copy Java. Old VB would have made them uncompetitive. So they did not spend new money on VB but let it slowly die. VB.NET is the future.

Well, doh. That's how competitive companies work in capitalism.

In Cuba you can have all the fun of true-and-tested old-style technologies. Would you like ?

Re: If there are patent issues

[Anonymous Coward]

It's basically a better Java.

So, it's like "CVS done right"?

Allow me to quote: “Subversion has been the most pointless project ever started Subversion used to say, ‘CVS done right.’ With that slogan there is nowhere you can go. There is no way to do CVS right.” - Linus Thorvalds.

Re: If there are patent issues

[hobarrera]

By this time (w/ MS deliberately contributing to Mono no less) estoppel should quash any patent claims.

it's a good thing proving that in court is inexpensive and that they have a moral integrity to not use their vast army of lawyers to just bleed you until you cannot afford to defend yourself.

oh wait.

By this time (w/ MS deliberately contributing to Mono no less) estoppel should quash any patent claims.

it's a good thing proving that in court is inexpensive and that they have a moral integrity to not use their vast army of lawyers to just bleed you until you cannot afford to defend yourself.

oh wait.

If it came down to this, the PR hit on MSFT would be huge. They may win the trail, but they'll lose in image more than they can afford. Nobody would trust them again if they realize MS sues projects it actually collaborated with.

Re: If there are patent issues

[alex67500]

I came here for the LOLz: after seeing the title, it could only be a flame war. But 7 comments in and you've already made my day. Thank you.

Re: If there are patent issues

[xeoron]

Yeah, besides their used different uncompilable CPU architectures, so they must either plan to use a translation layer or are getting developers to recompile their code.

Re:If there are patent issues

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. Compilers just generate code.

If there is a patent violation is the compiler producer that fault, not the users of said compiler.

Now, if you repackage the said compiler, then you may be of a patent violation on your own.

Re:If there are patent issues

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is the XBox "One" not compatible with the XBox 360?

They have different CPU architectures so it's difficult. Anyway, Microsoft is in fact trying to bring XBox 360 titles to the Xbone.

Re:If there are patent issues

[melmut]

Same for any project or technology by anyone.

Re: If there are patent issues

[kbg]

You fail to consider that MS is a company and that means whenever a new person that has the ability to change policies get into office it means that it could start to enforce patent claims. It doesn't matter what the policies where in the past they can change at any time.

Re: If there are patent issues

[gbjbaanb]

said the man whose SCM allows you to delete history!

Re:If there are patent issues

[gbjbaanb]

there's about as much chance of it being abandoned as the Windows API being abandoned

oh shit.

(fortunately no-one cares about the new win API, and are still coding for Windows 7, but I do wonder what will happen when a critical mass are on Windows 10)

Re:If there are patent issues

[gbjbaanb]

bah. stupid slashdot comment system. They should dump it in favour of Disqus or something modern!

the link is:

http://winsupersite.com/blog/s...

Re:If there are patent issues

[jandersen]

You just shouldn't bother. It's not worth the risk.

Good summary, but to elaborate a bit:

- Mono is not quite .NET, so incompatible, and with Microsoft's history of making changes that break compatibility, mono is not likely to ever catch up.

- .NET applications are so often not well designed, in my experience. I suspect it may be because of the combination of poor development skills and an IDE that makes it all too easy to make poor design choices. I don't know if it still is this bad, but last I worked with Windows development, the C++ IDE I used had encapsulated network protocols in classes that could then be placed on the application window. Very easy, but unfortunately the Windows desktop is not re-entrant, which means that it is a very bad idea to, in effect, wire a listener for an asynchronous background activity into it. All you need is two network packets right after each other and a slow update of the screen, and the whole things dies.

- There does not seem to be an obvious need for .NET - we already have Java, which is universally available (IBM have even designed a dedicated 'Java CPU') and highly standardised. Just look at the heaps of acronyms: JMX, JNDI, ...

- There are several, very good IDEs that support Java extremely well: NetBeans, JDeveloper, Eclipse and no doubt loads more. NetBeans, for example, comes with features that nag you into adopting a good programming style.

And so on. .NET looks to me like a dead end. It may not be dead yet, but it is definitely not what you would call sprightly.

Re:If there are patent issues

[DoctorBonzo]

Then just stop developing anything, period.

There are patent issues with *everything*

Re: If there are patent issues

[jeremyp]

It's not a language at all. It includes a C# compiler but you can use any language that has a translator to CLR code.

Re: If there are patent issues

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft has claimed themselves that they not only contribute to Mono, but they work with Mono to help them with issues on a semi-regular basis. Even their MSDN magazine talks about Mono all the time, about how Microsoft is support Mono, how they're trying to test future projects against Mono, all kinds of stuff.

Re: If there are patent issues

[serviscope_minor]

There are no "shitty languages and implementations" only shitty developers and those trying to implement the shitty applications creations by those developers.

That's absolute bollocks.

Let try some reductio ad absurdum.

According to you, the only problem with Brainfuck is "shitty developers".

That is patently absurd.

Re: If there are patent issues

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never used Linq for data access. It's great for working with tasks, enumerables, and anonymous functions.

Re:If there are patent issues

[Anonymous Coward]

Software changes, and new technologies happen all the time. The worst thing you can do is be stagnent. The truth here is that MS delivers a top of the line OS, development environment, framework(.net), and in this case vm runtime(clr). There really are no good competitors in this space.

Having got that out of my system.

>>>If you spend the money to upgrade to VB.NET, well, you just spent a lot of money to stand still. And companies don't like to spend a lot of money to stand still, so while you're spending the money, it probably makes sense to consider the alternatives that you can port to that won't put you at the mercy of a single vendor and won't be as likely to change arbitrarily in the future. So as soon as people with large code bases start hearing that they're going to have to work to port their apps from VB to VB.NET with WinForms, and then they start hearing that WinForms isn't really the future, the future is really this Avalon thing nobody has yet, they start wondering whether it isn't time to find another development platform.

A few points here. First point, he's basically saying stay away from .net and move to something else. I don't know about any of you, but having developed buisness applications for various things in various languages, c#( in this case for me, but vb.net also qualifies) has been the fastest, easiest, best tool for the job hands down. I can whip out super complicated applications in almost no time, with almost no thought. Now not only does it have the .net framework which is an unquestionably steller framework(I've been using it since almost 2005 and I'm still finding things in there I never knew about), you also now have NuGet, which is basically like a pip or composer or npm etc.

The second thing I'd like to address is the mention of the "Avalon Thing"...It's apparent from that quote that this article is almost 10 years old at this point(and .net has only gained more momentum and gotten exceedingly better and more widely accepted). This turned into what's called WPF(silverlight was an offshoot of that). Now having used winforms and various other GUI kits, I have to say again, WPF is the best one I've ever used by far(If you're a java guy it's pretty similar to the glade stuff): if it was possible I'd replace html with this stuff. I can develop ridiculously rich, complicated, and user friendly interfaces is almost no time at all. I've never used anything like it, it's really in a class of its own.

Anyways, I had to put in my two cents because people give MS a hard time about this stuff, and clearly are just spouting out MS hate because it's the cool thing to do. I work with people like that, and the funny thing is, the more they actually learn and use the MS stack(not just CLR, or c#, or .net, but like sql server, windows server, IIS etc) the more they've come to appreciate the calibur of products they produce.

Re:If there are patent issues

[its.the.doc]

Now days it's the other way around, java has been stealing from .net

Re: If there are patent issues

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean like Apple? Or IBM? Or anyone else Microsoft has temporarily partnered with and then totally shafted later?

Re:If there are patent issues

[its.the.doc]

Oops, posted anon. That was me.

Re:If there are patent issues

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude - you are dumb as a fucking stump!

Re:If there are patent issues

[deKernel]

Uhm....none of your arguments deal with the issue of patents. All of your arguments deal with MS abandoning technology which can be a pain but doesn't deal with the argument.

Re: If there are patent issues

[sce7mjm]

mpe...none the wiser. I'll have to research it myself...

Re: If there are patent issues

[Anonymous Coward]

Like how Oracle sued Google for /using Java/?

Re:If there are patent issues

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem isn't a threat to individual programmers. They can walk away from a project.

What Microsoft can do is put Mono out of business by enforcing patents. Then you'd have to buy Microsoft's products to run you Mono application. Any savings or convenience Linux or OXS might have given you is out the door.

The only reason Mono is allowed to exist is that adoption is so low.

Re: If there are patent issues

[RavenLrD20k]

Nobody would trust them again if they realize MS sues projects it actually collaborated with.

Hi! You must be new to this earth; Welcome!

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, anyone? Microsoft has historically done more than enough to make it where "nobody would trust them again" on multiple PR fronts (the one that pissed me off and affected me more directly was what they did with MechWarrior, but there's a lot more than that). They seem to be doing fine... and there aren't many people or companies beyond Linux users who even know what the hell Mono is that matter in the eyes of Microsoft. For those companies that do happen to rely on Mono for Linux, you can bet that Microsoft would extend their own offering of a .NET platform for Linux using the remnants of Mono that they embraced. Companies that matter to Microsoft's world don't care about ethics, they only want solutions.

Long story short: The PR hit on MSFT would be miniscule compared to other PR hits that the company has already taken throughout their history (even the Simpsons used the 3 E's as a gag for an episode, complete with Bill Gates as a guest star), and probably not even noticed by anyone who mattered.

Re: If there are patent issues

[Anonymous Coward]

"shitty developers" have several defining features. They don't understand half of what they think they do. They don't understand that tools should be dictated by the solution they are tasked with creating and not by the mindless ravings of fanbois who always push one tool or environment regardless of whether it is the best choice for the job at hand.

Re:If there are patent issues

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? My ancient perl and C code will still compile and run on current compilers. I can make modifications and updates to it without having to worry about needing to re-write the whole thing in a different language because the languages are not controlled by a monolithic corporation with a proven history of abandoning APIs, languages, and technologies that they had originally promoted as "the way of the future that everyone should be doing".

Re:If there are patent issues

[Zalbik]

Remember VB?

Yes, I remember VB. It was the laughingstock of programming languages. I know very few developers who were anything but relieved when Microsoft put the final nail in the coffin of that abomination of a language.

Remember Silverlight? The "Flash Killer",

Yes, let's take terrible, proprietary, security-hole ridden technology and replace it with our terrible, proprietary, security-hole ridden technology. Netflix was utterly retarded for "betting the farm" on it. As such, it was never a particularly popular technology and was appropriately end-of-life'd when wiser minds at Microsoft realized there were much better ways to accomplish the same thing, and stopped investing in it.

BTW, Microsoft supported VB for 10 years after it's final version. Silverlight is still supported

I'm not sure what you are complaining about here

Re:If there are patent issues

[phantomfive]

I don't know about any of you, but having developed buisness applications for various things in various languages, c#( in this case for me, but vb.net also qualifies) has been the fastest, easiest, best tool for the job hands down. I can whip out super complicated applications in almost no time, with almost no thought.

I can see you're a .net fanboy.

Software changes, and new technologies happen all the time. The worst thing you can do is be stagnent.

But you still don't get it. Re-writing software because "something is new" is a lousy idea. I don't even know what to say to help you understand. Maybe your fanboyishness doesn't let you understand things. Do you understand why people still write in COBOL? Maybe thinking about that will help you.

Re:If there are patent issues

[phantomfive]

The brand, yes. The language, not so much. VB3 -> VB4 was a huge breaking transition in just as many respects as VB6 -> VB.NET, and that was in 1995. VB4 -> VB5 was also breaking in quite a few things, largely because of Win16->Win32 move; and that was in 1997.

That's a good point. VB was never known for being stable.

Most importantly, large chunks of .NET are now open source, including pretty much all of the web/server stack. It won't go away even if Microsoft were to drop it.

It doesn't really matter now, after the .net fiasco, most companies that could switched to web-based apps. This article goes into deeper detail.

Re: If there are patent issues

[Austerity Empowers]

The EFF has a lot of battles to fight that are more important than letting themselves be bled dry by a Microsoft booby-trap. MS can release it all to the public, for free, and, in writing, sign away their IP portfolio pertaining to mono, and it *may* be worth looking at. Short of that, avoid it like the plague. At best, it'll be another Java, free until someone buys the rights with more dubious intent. At worst, it's a sinkhole.

Civil courts are a rich man's game. If it's worth doing, it's worth re-implementing better, for free. Otherwise just stay the hell away from poison.

Re:If there are patent issues

[phantomfive]

No, you need to do better research if that's what you think. Or stay on your Microsoft stack, I don't care. The Linux kernel still runs binaries from the early 90s, and has a strong commitment to backwards compatibility, as one example. POSIX isn't going anywhere.

Re: If there are patent issues

[cyber-vandal]

You do know that you can write Web apps in .NET don't you?

Re: If there are patent issues

[phantomfive]

Fool! Last time I went to Microsoft, not even they were using asp.net. How long do you think before asp.net is abandoned?

Re: If there are patent issues

[cyber-vandal]

Well they're releasing a completely rewritten version next month. Why would they have gone to all that effort if they're about to abandon it and what are they planning to replace it with?

Re:If there are patent issues

[LordLimecat]

If Microsoft abandons Powershell, Im switching to Mac.

Re: If there are patent issues

[Gr8Apes]

I agree, it was an awesome comment, I'd have modded it Funny if I could have.

Re:If there are patent issues

[praxis]

Then just stop developing anything, period.

There are patent issues with *everything*

What are the patent issues with the C++ standard? Please, cite a specific patent.

Re: If there are patent issues

[Gr8Apes]

I am certain both you and benjymouse, if you are LINQ proponents, don't have a clue how to write high performance data access layers. I have had to undo that wonderful ORM/LINQ crap clueless morons like both of you (assumed by your comments) created because "it is awesome". Awesomely bad. LINQ straight-jackets you, as does every ORM library out there. It's just like a drug dealer, that first hit is free... That doesn't mean that you shouldn't use them as they have their place. But overall, be aware of their short-comings and make sure to wrap the access layer such that it can be wholesale replaced if need be.

Re: If there are patent issues

[Gr8Apes]

Considering that MS tried writing portions of Windows Vista in it and failed, um... yes as far as C# is concerned?

Re:If there are patent issues

[Anonymous Coward]

There are patent issues with every technology.

there are no patents on C++ and even if there were they would have expired by now.

Unless Disney owned the patents!

Re:If there are patent issues

[Rasperin]

First of all, this should be +5 informative. However I do have a bone to pick.

What is so hard about making a wrapper sdk for 360 to xbox one? So that it's simply "recompile & redeploy"? I know I'm just a shitty java dev but most frameworks that are built if they aren't backwards compatible then those frameworks die due to being considered unstable (or simply never get updated due to costs).

Re: If there are patent issues

[Anonymous Coward]

The Simpsons did it!!! Poor dr chaos, he will never take over the world. General disarray has his back though.

Re:If there are patent issues

[DoctorBonzo]

There doesn't have to be any patent associated with any particular language.

Patents can accrue to, among other things, "any useful method..." for X where X itself needn't be useful, and needn't be expressed in any particular language, computer or natural.

It's entirely possible, if not actually likely these days, that in the process of developing anything useful, you'll wind up re-inventing something that's already been granted a patent, however obscure.

It's not a good excuse to stop working altogether. You can at least hope that any patent has already expired or any infringement, deliberate or unintentional, will go unnoticed or unprosecuted. Worst case, you may have to pay for a license, but unless you're making a fair amount of money, that's unlikely.

Re: If there are patent issues

[Anonymous Coward]

That new version probably won't be compatible with the old releases.

Re: If there are patent issues

[shutdown -p now]

I don't know when was the last time you went to Microsoft, but practically anything that Microsoft puts on the web for the past ten years is written in ASP.NET, or, lately, ASP.NET MVC.

Re: If there are patent issues

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi! You must be new to the legal system; Welcome!

Promissory Estoppel, anyone? Microsoft has made public statements and licensing decisions more than enough to make it where "anybody trusting them" wouldn't even need a lawyer to argue their case against Microsoft.

If Microsoft were to try and enforce its patents or copyright claims on software that they've previously promised not to sue over, all you need to do to guarantee a win is show those promises to a judge, and say "I move to dismiss all of Microsoft's claims on the principle of promissory estoppel, your honor."

They cannot make promises that encourage you to do something, and then renege on those promises in order to "trap" you. There is NO incidence of this happening in the past, and there is NO reason to expect it to happen in the future. If they decided to fight on this, they would lose. Microsoft knows it and the courts know it, and the only reason YOU don't know it is that you are choosing to remain ignorant of how the legal system works, in order to feel like you've still got a great reason to hate on everything Microsoft does.

Long story short: MSFT would never do this, because PR hit, and because LEGAL LOSS. Stop being a whinging cunt and at least come up with a valid reason to dislike them.

Re:If there are patent issues

[Anonymous Coward]

But you still don't get it. Re-writing software because "something is new" is a lousy idea.

No, it really isn't. If you're not constantly improving your software and keeping it up to date, then your software is rotting.

Expecting the rest of the world to sit still around your precious app is ludicrous - platforms evolve, libraries evolve, technology evolves. The moment you say, "Ah, finally done, I don't have to rewrite ANYTHING else in this application, it's finally complete and maintenance free!" is the moment your application starts becoming irrelevant.

If you don't ever want to have to update your software, that's fine, but don't expect people to use it for the long term. The shift from VB6 to VB.net, if you chose to migrate in that way, could have easily happened over a couple years. What's that? You wrote the application 5 years ago, never touched it, and then realized you had to revamp almost the entire thing because the infrastructure had changed so much around it? Tough shit. That's life.

Re:If there are patent issues

[MrSteveSD]

It was a horrible mess, everything had to be re-written to be compatible because it was really an entirely new language. Developers were left in the lurch

I worked for a company with large amounts of VB6 code, certainly over a million dollars worth of developer time. The company simply could not afford to do a rewrite. I still can barely believe that Microsoft would screw so many businesses by doing that.

I vividly remember everyone gathering around as I used the project conversion wizard to convert from VB6 to VB.NET. I knew it wouldn't really work due to fundamental differences in the languages, but I felt we had to go through the motions. We sat there and watched the estimated time of completion climb and climb and climb. Eventually I think it just crashed.

At the time we had a big meeting and I tried to convince the company that we should move away from Microsoft technologies to avoid similar pain in the future. However, such is the "Gravitational Pull" of Microsoft products, we ended up sticking with them.

Of course, if there had been a compatible rival product (some kind of Borland VB) then it would have been much harder for Microsoft to abandon the language. This could be an issue if they try to abandon .NET due to the existence of Mono.

Re:If there are patent issues

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey guess what - you're in luck!

If they abandon .NET, you can fork it and maintain it yourself.

They cannot retroactively rescind licensing on something they've already released - they can ONLY close-source "future development."

Re:If there are patent issues

[praxis]

You did not answer my question. I asked "What are the patent issues with the C++ standard?". You answered that something one implements might infringe on someone else's patent, but that is irrelevant to the question.

Re: If there are patent issues

[RavenLrD20k]

they would lose

And to that they'd say, so what? It wouldn't be their first loss. It wouldn't hurt any more than a slap on the wrist. It wouldn't damage their worst PR damage. You also seem to miss the whole thing of embrace. They wouldn't be reneging on any their promises. They'd feed Mono with Microsoft dev mindshare. They would build it up to become a strong product house. They would then make moves to bring Mono development more and more in-house...if not outright buy all rights to the product and its name.

It would then continue to develop and grow as Microsoft extends its functionality as an inhouse product. Finally, once they have deemed the project sunsetted, the product is extinguished.

This is the path they took with Halo. This is what they did with MechWarrior. This is (essentially) what happened with Cygwin. Unless Nadella is being completely sincere about a New Microsoft (so far he seems to be, which is good...but, we'll have to see what kind of track record he holds on the very long term), this is something that I believe we can expect to see again with Mono.

Re:If there are patent issues

[melmut]

Same thing, really. You can still run some DOS binaries from the 80s in latest windows, even if that's anecdotal. Nowadays, I wouldn't know which platform I could trust (= not just OS) to stay unchanged / compatible for years. Linux isn't a good example for that. BTW, I'm not on MS stack. Just wanted to be fair.

Re:If there are patent issues

[phantomfive]

That's true, Microsoft used to be really good at that.

Of course, IBM can run code from the 70s (though it uses emulation).

Re: If there are patent issues

[cyber-vandal]

It's quite different but still backwards compatible from what I can see.

Re: If there are patent issues

[exomondo]

I'm not sure why you think it's a "booby-trap", it's not as though this is patent litigation, at worst it would be an issue of promissory estoppel so what exactly is the "booby-trap"?

in writing, sign away their IP portfolio pertaining to mono

They have already released it under the community promise, it's a legally binding document written in no uncertain terms. Beyond that how exactly do you expect it to be written? Is it that you don't understand the legally binding nature of the way it has already been written?

Re: If there are patent issues

[Anonymous Coward]

And to that they'd say, so what?

Only a completely nut would argue that "Microsoft losing their attempt to kill off open source usage of a product they open sourced" would somehow result in Microsoft saying "so what?" and somehow getting their way.

How the FUCK is Microsoft going to kill off something they have released in good faith under an open source license? They didn't manage to do it with Linux. They didn't manage to do it with gcc, apache, java, and a host of other open tech. They have yet to demonstrate in any way that they are capable of what you suggest - despite the fact that they have no doubt TRIED to do so.

And yet you still sit there, quivering in fear, that maybe somehow they've been pretending all along that they can't do anything, just to sucker people in, so they can drag a bunch of comparatively dirt-poor app developers into court, destroy all good will they've possibly garnered by their seeming good faith efforts to play well, all just to say "fuck you" to a bunch of people who decide whether or not to buy Microsoft products?

Seriously, your paranoia is breathtaking.

Re: If there are patent issues

[Anonymous Coward]

Could you please explain? So far you have said it is bad without any technical justification whatsoever, however your opponents have then just said you are wrong so neither side has any particular weight to their arguments. So since you are the one who started by saying it is bad could you elaborate on the elements you believe to be bad?

But overall, be aware of their short-comings

And what are the short-comings of LINQ for example?

Re: If there are patent issues

[exomondo]

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, anyone?

This was a line used when they wanted to eliminate Java, the proprietary product competitor of their competitor Sun back around 1995 and it didn't work so what exactly have they "Embraced, Extended and Extinguished"?

the one that pissed me off and affected me more directly was what they did with MechWarrior

Which wasn't "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" in any way, it was the well-known practice of platform exclusive games, nothing new there.

Thinking it applies to platform exclusive games means you don't know the meaning of the term:

"Embrace, extend, and extinguish", also known as "Embrace, extend, and exterminate", is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found and was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences to disadvantage its competitors.
Wikipedia

Re: If there are patent issues

[Anonymous Coward]

By this time (w/ MS deliberately contributing to Mono no less) estoppel should quash any patent claims.

it's a good thing proving that in court is inexpensive

Proving what? Did you actually read what he posted?

Re: If there are patent issues

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering that MS tried writing portions of Windows Vista in it and failed, um... yes as far as C# is concerned?

BAHAHAHAHAHA That's actually your basis? Really? The program failed so therefore the language it was written in must be at fault?! Holy shit some of you really are complete flaming retards.

Re: If there are patent issues

[Anonymous Coward]

Trust me! They have been planning all this for 4 decades, very soon they will implement their final solution and all those who use Microsoft products will be rendered completely useless as Microsoft extinguishes all their products, sacrifices themselves and brings about the Year of the Linux Desktop! That's right, with enough layers of conspiracy and cynicism you cannot help but realize that Microsoft is in actuality a pawn in Linus Torvalds' plan!

Re: If there are patent issues

[petermgreen]

git has it's own problems, in particular it has no good way to answer the.question "what code was in branch x of repo y at datetime x". Theres the reflog but that is considered more a disaster recovery feature than a proper history tracking feature.

Re: If there are patent issues

[Gr8Apes]

Your rant is interesting. I would argue C++ still allows you to shoot yourself in the foot just as badly as C. C# requires you go in unsafe mode, or pinvoke (still unsafe). Java truly prevents many of these things, until you start playing a little too heavily with dependency injection, reflection, or you abstract one too many layers with generics. Of course, none of those will have the same shotgun meets foot effect you can achieve with C/C++ unless you use JNI.

Re:If there are patent issues

[Anonymous Coward]

What is so hard about making a wrapper sdk for 360 to xbox one? So that it's simply "recompile & redeploy"?

They probably could do that but it would mean re-writing any assembly language optimizations that developers had put in there whereas if them emulate the whole thing they can get away with not having to do that. There may be other reasons but that's the only one I can think of immediately, also I'm assuming the performance improvement is enough be able to account for removing those optimizations and having the additional emulation overhead.

Re:If there are patent issues

[bondsbw]

You utterly failed to respond to his point.

And you utterly failed to read beyond my first paragraph, where I responded directly to his point:

Remember that VB 6 never actually died. It just stopped being improved. If you moved your app from VB 6 to VB.NET, that was your own choice for your own reasons... but let's be clear, it wasn't because suddenly your app stopped working or you couldn't maintain it.

Python also broke backwards compatibility, and it caused the exact same kind of issue for teams that were entrenched in version 2.x. So this certainly isn't a problem that exists only within the realm of proprietary software... Microsoft just gets a lot of blame because they have produced so many programming languages and frameworks that were in use for decades.

Things have to improve over time, and the old ways have to be deprecated. Sometimes that can be done within the framework of the existing approach, but sometimes it cannot.

Re:If there are patent issues

[phantomfive]

Dude, there are trillions of dollars of software in use today, and it can't be rewritten just because "things have to improve over time, and the old ways have to be deprecated." A CTO would be negligent if he didn't look for a platform that is going to stick around for a while. That's why every time you make an ATM withdraw, it runs through COBOL code. Once companies got burned by .net, they generally moved away from Microsoft as a platform for business software.

Re: If there are patent issues

[Gr8Apes]

Regarding LINQ. If I had time I'd go deeper, but the level of effort required to tune for performance compared to just writing your own custom data access layer appears to be about on par at best and still leaves you with potential performance pitfalls. If you understand data access layers and DBs, you should have no trouble writing a reasonably decent performing one with a fraction of the effort to get LINQ running equivalently. It'll have the additional advantage of having clear divisions of responsibility, and might actually be maintainable by the mere mortals that follow as well.

Re: If there are patent issues

[bondsbw]

You seem to think that Microsoft has monopoly on deprecation, but you seem to ignore how often they are backwards compatible. As a counter-example, the C# and VB.NET teams have gone out of their way to not only keep from breaking BC, but also to help prevent the need to break it in the future. They even have open-sourced their next generation compiler platform for both C# and VB.NET.

I don't blame someone for being cautious after seeing what happened with VB 6, but ignoring a well-supported and highly stable set of platforms completely--just because the company that produces them is the same one that killed VB 6 two decades ago--is foolish.

Re: If there are patent issues

[phantomfive]

You seem to think that Microsoft has monopoly on deprecation,

Of course not. Other platforms have issues too, which is a negative for those platforms; but Microsoft is the topic here.

but ignoring a well-supported and highly stable set of platforms completely--just because the company that produces them is the same one that killed VB 6 two decades ago--is foolish.

If there were no other options, that would absolutely be true. .Net is one of a crowd.

Re: If there are patent issues

[Anonymous Coward]

The famous quote from Bjarne is "C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off."

Re:If there are patent issues

[Anonymous Coward]

VB6 applications still ran on the next version of Windows, and beyond. Really, what you're complaining about is bullshit. It's like complaining that Visual C++ 2008 didn't compile VC6 applications because the later compiler is more standard compliant and removed widely used quirks from it's implementation.

All VB6 developers needed to do was stay on VB6 and use it, the same way Visual FoxPro developers *gasp* just kept using Visual FoxPro 9 when Microsoft dropped development for it.

The same way ASP developers kept using ASP even though Microsoft have moved onto ASP.NET.

The same way MFC developers still used MFC even if Microsoft was moving towards .NET Interop (Managed C++, C++/CLI, etc.), instead.

Visual Basic is a much, much, MUCH better programming language than it ever was back then. They did the right thing.

P.S. Microsoft did the same thing with J++ to J#. Ultimately, their goal was to potentially move as many people to C# as possible, anyways, but they were forced to put in more development to C++ (bringing back MFC/updating it) and Visual Basic because of hold-outs (quite vocal ones).

However, Visual Basic and C# are largely twins. I prefer Visual Basic because of the way it reads. I personally don't like C-based languages because they are verbose in the wrong ways *for me*.

People who wanted Visual Basic-like productivity in an IDE could have easily gone to Delphi or C++Builder, but few of them went because they didn't actually know how to develop software. It's just the Visual Basic IDE made it easy for people to throw together shitty code and a user interface and call it an Enterprise Application (not all, but far too many).

Re:If there are patent issues

[datavirtue]

My first time seeing the share button where the comment count used to be. Oddly...it has caused me to stop reading the comments. Slashdot will always be an awesome memory for me...sad to see it go....really sad.

Re:If there are patent issues

[jopsen]

That's a contract...hence, a license...

Re:If there are patent issues

[vilanye]

Python also broke backwards compatibility, and it caused the exact same kind of issue for teams that were entrenched in version 2.x.

Wrong, Python 2.x is still being developed. It is not like VB6 in the slightest. Python 2.7.10 was released just last month.

Yeah, Guido should have called Python 3 something else, but it is not like the differences are that massive if you want to upgrade to 3.

Re:If there are patent issues

[vilanye]

What?

Joel is talking about moving your code to a new platform not updating your application.

Moving your code to the new shiny means that you aren't moving and are spending a lot of time and money not moving.

He is saying don't move to .NET, stick with VB6 so you can continue to add features.

It is not that complicated.

Re:If there are patent issues

[bondsbw]

VB 6 was still supported, and continued to have service pack releases, for several years after VB.NET was produced.

Why?

[binarylarry]

Why use a Java clone instead of just using Java?

I suppose there's the Oracle factor which sucks. But Mono is by Microsoft, so it's just as bad.

Re:Why?

[binarylarry]

In before some pedant, .NET is by microsoft and mono is a clone of .NET.

So it's a clone of a clone. Didn't we all see that Futurama episode?

Re:Why?

[aardvarkjoe]

Why use a Java clone instead of just using Java?

Maybe because some people prefer C# to Java? They aren't exactly the same, after all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_C_Sharp_and_Java.

Re:Why?

[binarylarry]

True but it seems kind of ridiculous to choose an entire platform based on some minor differences in syntax.

I suppose if you're already really familiar with the Microsoft software stack, like you used to build VB apps and have already invested a great deal in Microsoft's tools it might make sense.

But otherwise, it's a smaller ecosystem with fewer libraries, fewer developers, fewer choices, fewer large scale deployments to learn from.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because Java sucks in comparison.

Re:Why?

[naasking]

True but it seems kind of ridiculous to choose an entire platform based on some minor differences in syntax.

They aren't minor, and some of MS's libraries are unparalleled on Java because of the syntactic choices they made.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it is better. The risk of getting sued by Microsoft is smaller than the risk that your project will fail because you use Java. Microsoft has said they guarantee that they will not guarantee that they will sue you. They guarantee there is a chance that they won't while if you use Java you are pretty much guaranteed to fail. It's just less risk.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

it's a smaller ecosystem[citation needed] with fewer libraries[citation needed], fewer developers[citation needed], fewer choices[citation needed], fewer large scale deployments to learn from[citation needed].

FTFY.

I've been developing primarily in .NET for the last 8 years, after being a Java developer (primarily) for at least as long prior to that. At first, I was skeptical of .NET and especially of Microsoft. But over the last 8 years, I've realized that it's a tool that allows you to get work done. As such, I've found that it not only has as much of all of those things you mentioned, but it also has better quality in every area. Java still has that suck-it-and-see feel to it, while .NET seems to just get out of the way. And the tools available for .NET are about a million times better in every regard. I shudder when I think back about editing the ANT script to build and deploy a simple SOAP service. For .NET, that's a simple build/copy-the-DLL script, even without any formal deployment server setup.

Re:Why?

[MightyMartian]

Care to quantify that risk for us? Go on, I'd like to see how you have done this assessment.

Re:Why?

[Livius]

It's actually a Delphi clone.

Re:Why?

[Giant Electronic Bra]

In practice the differences are fairly trivial. They are both static strongly-typed languages which support reflection, introspection, inversion of control, and some degree of templating. There's really very little choose one over the other that amounts to anything at the level that architects should be thinking about. If you are considering other languages you should be considering maybe Erlang, Go, Rust, or one of the various JVM targeted languages like Clojure. Making C# an important point of distinction is pretty menial.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

it's a smaller ecosystem[citation needed] with fewer libraries[citation needed], fewer developers[citation needed], fewer choices[citation needed], fewer large scale deployments to learn from[citation needed].

FTFY.

I've been developing primarily in .NET for the last 8 years, after being a Java developer (primarily) for at least as long prior to that. At first, I was skeptical of .NET and especially of Microsoft. But over the last 8 years, I've realized that it's a tool that allows you to get work done. As such, I've found that it not only has as much of all of those things you mentioned, but it also has better quality in every area. Java still has that suck-it-and-see feel to it, while .NET seems to just get out of the way. And the tools available for .NET are about a million times better in every regard. I shudder when I think back about editing the ANT script to build and deploy a simple SOAP service. For .NET, that's a simple build/copy-the-DLL script, even without any formal deployment server setup.

Back to the original topic, is all this true of .NET on Linux? Genuinely curious because honestly, most things on Linux have a suck-it-and-see feel.

Re:Why?

[subanark]

And if you want to use some java library in .NET environment, IKVM will convert java library binaries into .NET binaries.

Re:Why?

[petermgreen]

I'd say it's a mashup of the two. Like java it has garbage collection*, like Java it represents strings as immutable classes which require a reallocation for any modification.unlike delphi which classically* uses refcounted strings and will in-place modify strings that have a refcount of 1. It has operator overloading which is something that java does not have and something delphi only added relatively recently*. It has properties like delphi and unlike java. It has user defined value types like . It uses a C/C++ based synatax (like java) rather than a pascal based syntax (like delphi). It has "delegates" which are essentially equivilent to the "method pointers" in Delphi, Java also added something similar but only very recently.

My big concern with mono is that they don't seem to have the resources to maintain it the same level that Java on linux is maintained to. In particular they implemented .nets main gui library windows.forms but then declared it unsupported. They were also very slow in adding properly working support for arm hard float systems.

* AIUI there is now a version of delphi for .net which presumablly uses .net conventions on these things.
**Disclaimer: I don't know exactly when delphi added it other than i'm pretty sure it was after the most recent version I used.

Re:Why?

[binarylarry]

I bet that "just works" in non trivial circumstances like a fine bottle of wine.

Re:Why?

[Dave Emami]

* AIUI there is now a version of delphi for .net which presumablly uses .net conventions on these things. **Disclaimer: I don't know exactly when delphi added it other than i'm pretty sure it was after the most recent version I used.

That would be Oxygene, aka Delphi Prism.

Re:Why?

[subanark]

Java is designed to be cross platform. In this case instead of targeting an operating system, you are targeting another virtual environment. While not perfect, it works much more often out of the box than WINE does.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Java was designed to sell servers for Sun Microsystems. C#/.net was designed for people to write GUI and database applications easily.

Java: From based on reports from the field, trying to use ti for desktop apps it totally blows in every manner possible. And because it's write once run everywhere, Java applications look like crap everywhere. Personal experience, Writing GUI desktop apps in C#/.net is easy and everything just works.

Linux really needs something like C#/.net for applications. Java doesn't cut it, no one uses it which is proof enough.

Ether way this is Slashdot, where it might as well be 1999, no one has forgotten anything nor learned anything in the last 15 years. Sun is gone. Bill Gates is gone, Jobs is dead, and Java is owned by the Devil of Redwood Shores. But yeah keep rating about what Microsoft did in the late 80's early 90s.

Re:Why?

[Rinikusu]

I hate to say it, but given the choice between ORACLE and Microsoft.. Fuck Oracle.

Re: Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually that is incorrect to say the differences are small. Not all of the languages you listed have better support than mono utilizing c# to interface with the gui of windows, os x, ios, and X11. Not all of those languages have better support for interop either. If they all have similar reflection capabilities where is the equivalent to Roslyn with the dependency injection features which are now shipped with .net? I could go on but I can look at a game like bastion or go to a site like stack overflow and know quality when I see it and it is in c#. The only thing more extensible than c# is c++ mainly because of the great number of Microsoft powered servers and computers. IIS has a huge share of the web in general at this point too. VS has the best debugger so are you going to use it against clojure? Compared to eclipse doing oracle Java development on a Linux machine I would rather use monodevelop and c#. Businesses and end users are NOT running Linux and Java or Go or Erlang or Scala or whatever the hell. Time to get paid for real and learn a language with a capital C in it.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because there are big and substantive differences between Java and C#: no type erasure for parameterized types, multidimensional arrays, and a much more efficient native code interface, to name just a few.

C# is a good general purpose programming language; Java almost is, but Sun/Oracle never quite fixed some basic problems with it.

Re:Why?

[vux984]

True but it seems kind of ridiculous to choose an entire platform based on some minor differences in syntax.

Wait, Is that why I should stop using c# and use Java? Or the other way around? I mean, your statement seems to have this built in assumption that java is the default choice; and not-java needs to justify itself relative to java. I really see no reason that Java is the default choice.

If anything Java's big corporate sponsor is worse than Microsoft.

But otherwise, it's a smaller ecosystem with fewer libraries, fewer developers, fewer choices, fewer large scale deployments to learn from.

I dunno; the windows ecosystem is pretty darn big after all. c# bindings for pretty much everything exist. There are definitely lots of situations where Java makes more sense... but its hardly as one sided as you make out.

Re: Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Swing does JavaFX is actually decent though.

Re:Why?

[MightyMartian]

Yeah, Eclipse is just such a piece of junk...

Oh wait, it isn't, and it's written in Java.

Or to put it another way, fuck off MS shill. Java has had responsive GUI libraries for a decade now.

Re:Why?

[shutdown -p now]

From an architectural perspective, the differences may look small - an OOP language is an OOP language. But for those "coding in the trenches", they can easily add up to hours of saved time due to the ability to apply DRY more consistently, for example.

Granted, Java has caught up on the most important piece, which is lambdas. But their generics still suck (which spills over into lambdas, because they use nominal function types), they don't have sequence comprehensions, and they don't have any syntactic sugar for continuation-style async programming.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Eclipse is junk. It can't open projects of significant size, and it takes multiple seconds to resize on our workstations.

Perhaps you should do some real development instead of just adding a getter to a java class you didn't write.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate to say it, but given the choice between ORACLE and Microsoft.. Fuck Oracle.

So what's wrong with Oracle for you as a Linux guy? Here you can see a list of some of its contributions to the operating system you use: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/server-storage/linux/technical-contributions-1689636.html

I think that's quite a lot. At least more than what microsoft will ever do for you.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that you've inserted all those "citation needed", you shouldn't stop and also put them inside your text. Otherwise it's looking like a microsoft leaflet.

Re: Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

During allbthese years, I have been hearing the same thing. At the same time, oracle sued the hell out of google for using itnin android while MS did nothing and moved to a more open approach. I wonder why would anyone would prefer java if the goal is openness.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

> So what's wrong with Oracle for you as a Linux guy?

Claiming copyright on APIs that basically would kill projects like WINE for example? Besides the other massive issues it would create everywhere, so how can any sane software developer not hate Oracle?

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Claiming copyright on APIs that basically would kill projects like WINE for example

If our legislation allows a company to claim copyright on an API, then it is the law that is wrong and not that company. Isn't it?

And considering Oracle has no involvement at all in Wine I can't see how it is their fault if it's eventually killed. I think it would be microsoft's, because they are the only owners of their win32 api, so it would be their decision to sue and put that project to an end.

so how can any sane software developer not hate Oracle?

Lots of developers make a living using Oracle products and technologies for free. So I don't think they hate Oracle when it is providing them lots of high quality tools at no cost for getting their work done.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait, Is that why I should stop using c# and use Java?

You should stop C++ and use Java if you want to be able to run apps on non-Windows machines. Which happen to comprise a significant percentage of the workhorse systems of the Internet world.

Yes, I know Mono makes ".Net" run on Linux. But remember Visual J++? It was "Java", but Microsoft welded it to classes that were direct mappings into Windows and no other OS. That's the real danger of .Net, more so than Patents or Microsoft Is Evil or whatever. Lack of choice. .Net and Java have a lot in common. They're both platforms that could potentially run anywhere presented by companies that have vested interests in both compilers and OS's. The difference is that Java has always been inclusive - reaching out to other platforms even at the expense of not fully exploiting its own home ground, while .Net comes from a culture of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish".

That is, one allows flexibility, the other risks getting locked in to the Windows world. Which may be large, but it's not infinite. As demonstrated by the fact that most of the Internet's tools, protocols and processes were originally honed on non-Microsoft platforms. And to a great degree, the same can be said of cloud computing.

Re:Why?

[inasity_rules]

Mixed bag in my experience... Apart from a couple of 3rd party windows specific libraries I use, most of my code runs fine under mono.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Eclipse is your idea of a responsive GUI?

Re:Why?

[jedidiah]

The proof is in the pudding. If Mono were such a great thing for Linux users and Linux developers then it would already have some nice EXAMPLES to point to as to why you would want to use it. There would be apps out there saying "install Mono so you can run me".

It would be much like WINE.

A lot of droning on about rhetoric and marketing bullet points is really quite irrelevant.

For what Mono is being overhyped over, it should sell itself easily.

Re:Why?

[jedidiah]

> If our legislation allows a company to claim copyright on an API, then it is the law that is wrong and not that company. Isn't it?

Nice diversion there. It's specifically Oracle that's trying to push this atrocity. The fact that they can find civil servants stupid enough to go along with them glosses over the fact that they are the prime mover here.

Re: Why?

[jedidiah]

No. Microsoft just sues companies over nonsense like VFAT.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes but why are they trying to push this? I suppose it's all due to economic interests. But that's how corporate America operates today, isn't it? So what's wrong with companies trying to get profit using this kind of tools?

Re:Why?

[geggo98]

Why use a Java clone instead of just using Java?

I suppose there's the Oracle factor which sucks. But Mono is by Microsoft, so it's just as bad.

As long as Java and .NET are both strong in the market, we can safely use them. As soon as either Oracle or Microsoft wins, the developers will start to loose. So as a Java user I will always advertise C#, not only because it is really a nice language (just think about LINQ, Async/Await and Rx), but also because its competition makes Java stronger.

Re:Why?

[Giant Electronic Bra]

And you know what? We don't use any of that stuff, because we want our code to be COMPREHENSIBLE. Lambdas don't do anything for me that I can't do with a loop, and at least I can see instantly "Yep, that's a loop!" For the very few cases where it might be helpful, that's great, but its really VERY few cases. I have yet to write one.

Java's generics are fine. They do the most important part of being generics perfectly well. Again, the things that you seem to want of them are things that negatively impact maintainability in most cases. Truthfully you are VERY rarely going to want to design your own generics. I've done it 5 or 6 times in the last 10 years, and at least 2-3 of those times were probably not good ideas. Consuming generics is great though.

As for DRY... I'm at a loss why anyone would think that you'd repeat yourself in Java. There are all sorts of tools for avoiding that. I've got a million line code base, nothing that shouldn't be repeated is repeated. Application logic exists in one place, everything is highly modular, and I don't find it any more verbose than any other statically typed strict OO language. I think MS certainly looked carefully at Java and in some very minor ways improved on the syntax, but at worst the difference is small, and with Java's vast arrays of libraries, frameworks, and tools, its hard to beat. Chances are MUCH higher you'll end up doing more work in C# simply because you can't find exactly the tool you need. You might write 5 lines less application code, in theory, but you'll end up implementing some whole library that I got for free off apache.org.

Re:Why?

[jcadam]

You have got to be kidding me. Eclipse is a giant, steaming pile of poop. I've used a lot of development environments over the years (including a lot of obscure ones like Rational APEX and GPS), and words can not describe the anguish of being forced to work on a huge codebase in Eclipse (mandated by management, along with a long list of plugins that had to be installed). I actually quit my job because I couldn't take the project mismanagement and the horrible dev environment anymore.

Now, during interviews I ask what IDE the team uses. The correct answer is "Whatever you want", though I might also accept IntelliJ, Netbeans, vim, etc. If I hear "We're an Eclipse shop" I run away screaming (Or I say, "Sorry, not interested" and then walk away).

Re:Why?

[PRMan]

Sorry, but if you're coming from Visual Studio, Eclipse is a piece of junk.

Re:Why?

[PRMan]

If it runs on Mono, yes.

Re:Why?

[PRMan]

They never finished Windows Forms 100%, but I've never had an issue with anything I ported.

Re:Why?

[shutdown -p now]

And you know what? We don't use any of that stuff, because we want our code to be COMPREHENSIBLE. Lambdas don't do anything for me that I can't do with a loop, and at least I can see instantly "Yep, that's a loop!" For the very few cases where it might be helpful, that's great, but its really VERY few cases. I have yet to write one.

Yeah, yeah. We've heard this before. Back in the day, people were saying the same things about those new-fangled "for" and "while" loops. After all, we want our code to be comprehensible! A loop doesn't do anything for me that I can't do with a goto, and at least I can see instantly, "yep, that's a control flow transfer!".

Meanwhile, people have embraced the new tools (which are the majority outside of the Java land - even the C++ guys have and use lambdas now), and they became idiomatic, and standard libraries were upgraded to rely on them - making them both more powerful and easier to read. As it happens, I use both C# and C++, and it's a rare day at work that I don't use a lambda anywhere. Looking at other people's [quality] code, it's mostly similar. And guess what? It's all still perfectly readable, so long as you take some time and learn how it works. In most cases, in fact, it's more readable than the code that it replaced, and more maintainable to boot (because DRY).

Java's generics are fine. They do the most important part of being generics perfectly well. Again, the things that you seem to want of them are things that negatively impact maintainability in most cases.

I was referring mostly to type erasure, obviously. How does getting read of that negatively impact maintainability?

In the meantime, Java now has this beauty. Because they can't just say Func<T>, and have it work well for primitive types.

As for DRY... I'm at a loss why anyone would think that you'd repeat yourself in Java.

If you don't have first-class functions in a language, you'll be doing a lot of of DRY for that reason alone (yes, you can use anon classes instead, but no-one actually does because it's so verbose it defeats the point). If I have to explain how and why that works, then you should probably go read some FP tutorial.

I think MS certainly looked carefully at Java and in some very minor ways improved on the syntax, but at worst the difference is small,

You think wrong, and you didn't bother to investigate enough to make such a conclusion. This was kinda sorta true 14 years ago. It's not true now. Things that C# has that Java does not include e.g. dynamic and async/await, neither of which are "very minor ways".

with Java's vast arrays of libraries, frameworks, and tools, its hard to beat.

It's kinda like the iOS app store. Sure, it has 3 million apps, but in practice you need maybe 30 for any particular case, and 300 across everything. I won't dispute that Java has more libraries, but pretty much any mainstream language/platform these days, including .NET, has all the libraries that matter, for the simple reason that all of them have a fairly large community that will write or wrap one if they need it. I don't recall ever running into a situation where I couldn't find a library to do something that I needed to do, in any popular language.

Re:Why?

[CastrTroy]

Personally if there wasn't some other major reason, I would choose .Net over Java for any project simply based on how well it handles dates, as well as the existence of the decimal data type. Simply having a base 10 decimal variable type solves so many problems. Java users will say, just multiply everything by 100 and store in an integer, or use BigDecimal. But those are just kludges that fall apart when you all of a sudden need to store 3 decimal places, or are cumbersome to use because Java doesn't have operator overloading, so you have to use function calls to do stuff like add two BigDecimal objects together.

Re:Why?

[tobiasly]

Java is designed to be cross platform. In this case instead of targeting an operating system, you are targeting another virtual environment. While not perfect, it works much more often out of the box than WINE does.

.NET also targets a virtual environment, called the Common Language Runtime. It's the same concept as the JVM. There is absolutely no WINE involved with running Mono apps on other platforms; they run on a native implementation of the CLR on that platform.

Microsoft themselves only implemented the CLR on one platform, but that doesn't mean it wasn't also designed to be corss-platform. It even has means of querying the platform (usually via System.Environment) rather than assuming Windows-isms.

Re:Why?

[jp10558]

I'm no MS Shill, but I really hate Java. Mostly because for some reason people still use it on the web, but can't be arsed to update so it works with Java 8.

Oh, and I hate that the installer and configuratior is almost impossible to successfully script - so managed deployments are a PITA. Somehow, going from java 7 to java 8 with what seemed a consistent, simple jre-bla-bla.exe /s REBOOT=Suppress make Java 8 unable to install. The only way to get it to work was to go find the javacpl.exe they hid in the Program Files (x86)/Java folder, run it, and manually uncheck "Enable Java in the browser". There IS NO CLI way to do this that I can find. Then you can install Java 8 and then get to go back and re-check that box.

This is crazy.

Re:Why?

[Giant Electronic Bra]

Yeah, yeah. We've heard this before. Back in the day, people were saying the same things about those new-fangled "for" and "while" loops. After all, we want our code to be comprehensible! A loop doesn't do anything for me that I can't do with a goto, and at least I can see instantly, "yep, that's a control flow transfer!".

Oh, good lord, its not even close to the same thing, there's nothing AT ALL obtuse about: for(String value : props.values()) { .... do something, which can easily be a call to another method, and probably should, lambda or not.... } I mean its fine to make realistic arguments, but calling for and while loops "just like goto" is preposterous.

Meanwhile, people have embraced the new tools (which are the majority outside of the Java land - even the C++ guys have and use lambdas now), and they became idiomatic, and standard libraries were upgraded to rely on them - making them both more powerful and easier to read. As it happens, I use both C# and C++, and it's a rare day at work that I don't use a lambda anywhere. Looking at other people's [quality] code, it's mostly similar. And guess what? It's all still perfectly readable, so long as you take some time and learn how it works. In most cases, in fact, it's more readable than the code that it replaced, and more maintainable to boot (because DRY).

"Its fashionable so you should do it too" is not an argument, its lazy. I am constantly, and always have been constantly, lauded for the extremely fine quality of code that I write. I refactor constantly and have many years of experience reusing and refactoring code. I don't know of ANY significant benefit in terms of code reuse of features that are present in C# and missing in Java. I could write the gospel on code reuse, believe me.

If you don't have first-class functions in a language, you'll be doing a lot of of DRY for that reason alone (yes, you can use anon classes instead, but no-one actually does because it's so verbose it defeats the point). If I have to explain how and why that works, then you should probably go read some FP tutorial.

Oh, good grief! I use these things all the time. They are quite explicit and you have the choice to use anonymous, inner, or outer classes, which is often quite nice and in more complicated UIs is what you often want to do anyway. Its just not a big deal, and there's again no impact on DRY unless you have some sort of incredibly lazy coders that should be kicked off the project or something.

It's kinda like the iOS app store. Sure, it has 3 million apps, but in practice you need maybe 30 for any particular case, and 300 across everything. I won't dispute that Java has more libraries, but pretty much any mainstream language/platform these days, including .NET, has all the libraries that matter, for the simple reason that all of them have a fairly large community that will write or wrap one if they need it. I don't recall ever running into a situation where I couldn't find a library to do something that I needed to do, in any popular language.

Well, mostly this is true. There's often a greater range of choices with Java libraries, which CAN be quite nice. In terms of larger assemblies of code there's MUCH more variety. Part of the reason being that Java didn't try to nail things like enterprise architecture down in the core system nearly as much. There are easily 8 different free high-quality containers for instance, many different persistence tools, etc. .NET tends to have what MS provided, or else a port of one or two of what is available in Java. Sometimes that's for the best, other times maybe not so much.

Truthfully, procedural static highly typed OO languages were mostly perfected long before Java or C# got on the scene. Anything that has been added in the last 10 years is trivial compared to the huge advances of the 80's and 90's. I mean I

Re:Why?

[Giant Electronic Bra]

Doesn't seem like that big a deal to me. First of all, EVERYTHING, has some sort of scaling limitation, so if you are going to use the multiply trick, then just use a BIG number, one that will never be an issue.

I hate operator overloading, and this is a point in favor of Java, they eschewed things of little value that add lots of coder overhead to sort out when they go wrong. The code base I maintain is financial code, handling transactions, and even more special than that it has to work in every currency and handle precision that varies from 2 to 7 decimal places (and that has to be configurable everywhere for each flavor of transaction and account). I don't know if this could even be handled by a BCD data type or not. Its not simply a matter of scaling, there are complexities around how different numbers are rounded, cumulative error, etc. These can be handled using BigDecimal and some additional bookkeeping, but even if C#'s decimal type would work, it would only save a pretty small amount of code. Its quite possible it wouldn't work anyway.

I'm just not sure why people have problems with dates. I made an architectural decision a LONG time back, every date is a long milliseconds of Unix epoch, and never looked back. Client software can do whatever it wants with that. Javascript has a perfectly fine function to render that right into the browser's locale, and Java clients will format it by default into the local time format for output. My feeling is that the vast majority of date problems people have are because their data architecture is poorly chosen. In the few cases where you find yourself forced to say parse some random junk from some file, use GregorianCalendar, it works quite nicely and along with DateFormat you're mostly pretty much set. If you work with some horrible old code that tries to make the old Date object do the right thing, meh, well, we all bear the crosses of ancient mistakes.

Now, don't get me wrong. In think MS took a good look at Java and made a few minor improvements. OTOH a lot of their libraries kinda suck too, so its a bit of a tossup. If we could take the both of best worlds I'd be thrilled. Whatever the result was, it just has to compile my millions of $ worth of existing code... ;)

Re:Why?

[CastrTroy]

What happens if you need to store a date before 1970? What if you need a date with more resolution than a millisecond?

Also, perhaps operator overloading can be misused, but it comes in really handy when you have a class that actually represents a number. You probably don't want to start overriding the plus operator for objects that store XML documents or twitter messages, but that doesn't mean the feature shouldn't exist at all.

And perhaps you should do some reading about the .Net decimal data type. It has 28 significant digits. That means that even if you need 8 decimal places (like for bitcoin) you still have enough digits left over to represent extremely large numbers. Basically it has enough range to cover just about every financial transaction most coders are likely to deal with. Most databases (all) have a decimal data type for storing binary coded decimal information. The programming language you're using should also support them.

Re:Why?

[Giant Electronic Bra]

What happens if you need to store a date before 1970? What if you need a date with more resolution than a millisecond?

But I never ever ever will. I know my problem domain. If I was writing code that was going to be used to measure picoseconds, then by gosh I'd use a different scaling. Since nobody will ever give a crud to more than a millisecond in my problem domain you would be asking me to carry a large amount of crap baggage around my code for some non-existing fairytale use case. Same for dates prior to 1970, I'm not doing archaeology here, I'm doing financial transactions. I will never see any date prior to NOW() ever again...

Also, perhaps operator overloading can be misused, but it comes in really handy when you have a class that actually represents a number. You probably don't want to start overriding the plus operator for objects that store XML documents or twitter messages, but that doesn't mean the feature shouldn't exist at all.

Eh, in my quite large amount of programming experience I've seen lots of quite ugly misuses of operator overloads. It MIGHT make some decimal arithmetic slightly cleaner, but I'd most likely have to surround the '+' with extra guards, check rounding and possible precision issues anyway, etc, so it wouldn't gain me very much. Maybe there are cases, in a math package or something, where it might be handy. I'm perfectly happy with the decision to not support it, as I benefit from that everyday in knowing what exactly '+' does and not having to worry about it. Again, its the real gain vs the hypothetical gain. IMHO KISS is the best policy.

And perhaps you should do some reading about the .Net decimal data type. It has 28 significant digits. That means that even if you need 8 decimal places (like for bitcoin) you still have enough digits left over to represent extremely large numbers. Basically it has enough range to cover just about every financial transaction most coders are likely to deal with. Most databases (all) have a decimal data type for storing binary coded decimal information. The programming language you're using should also support them.

And it does, with individually settable precision, rounding, and scaling. Its really quite good. Yes, you must perforce use the object method call notation to do your math, but you'd have to do that anyway for anything very complex, and its not like stopPx.add(orderMarkdown).setScale(inst.get("PRICEDIGITS") is that horrendous, or appears 1000's of times in code. So everything I need to do IS supported in a way that's usually reasonably clear and concise. If I generate an SQL query with a DECIMAL(M,N) valued column I get the corresponding BigDecimal representation, all nice and neat!

Re:Why?

[CastrTroy]

Oh, but they did reuse the plus (+) operator for string concatenating. What they did with the language was allow a very specific object to reuse an operator because it made sense, but at the same time decided that nobody could possibly come up with another instance where it would make sense to use operator overloading. Some languages use a completely different operator for string concatenation. I wonder why they didn't decide to do that in Java.

Re:Why?

[vilanye]

Well if Oracle succeeds they will get sued because a fair amount of the method headers in the API's are exactly the same as function headers in C or C++.

It is not implementation that Oracle is trying to protect, but function/method headers which are no different than a table of contents or an ingredient list in a recipe, neither of which of copy-writable.

Re:Why?

[vilanye]

Lambdas are far more useful than simply abstracting loops, which are an abstraction itself. You can actually pass in code to other methods so you don't have to use retardation like Comparable and Comparator to endlessly repeat yourself for each search or sort you want to perform that differs from the default implementation. At least interfaces can have implementation, that is a small improvement.

In Ruby because C# makes me feel dirty:

array.sort #default sort
array.sort {|l,r| rl} # reverse sort, pretending that reverse doesn't exist
array.sort{|l,r| l.some_valr.some_value}

Pre-Java 8, that was a painful thing to do. More usefully you can now use lambdas instead instead of the nasty boilerplate of anonymous classes to clean up your code for things like listeners.

Spend some time in Scala or JRuby and find out that you can do a lot, cleanly, concisely, easy to maintain and in a tenth of the LOC that Java requires. It will make your Java code better.

And no Java generics suck because of type erasure leading to this senselessness:

ArrayList myStrings = new ArrayList();
...
String tmp = (String)myStrings.get(0);

What a joke.

There are tools in IDE's to take care of the boilerplate but it still exists and still needs to be maintained.

What cracks me up are Java accessors and mutators that don't do any thing other than store and retrieve a value.

public void setIdiocy(SomeType idiot) {
this.idiot=idiot;
}

Just make the fields public, it is the same thing.

Re:Why?

[vilanye]

for and while loops are syntactic sugar for GOTO's.

What do you think they compile down to?

smh

Re:Why?

[Giant Electronic Bra]

You've been able to supply a comparator to a sort, or to a collection with a concept of order, forever. I mean if I were to paste in an example it would seem a little clunky by comparison to Ruby, since it would require a bit of extra declaration, but its the same basic thing. I've got an entire order matching engine core class that utilizes this concept to implement multiple different selection criteria for orders. And nobody uses a loop for this sort of thing, you use currying, even in Java. Or at least you simply call a method that returns a list of results that match your criteria in some preferred order.

I don't do a lot of anonymous class boilerplate, but then I don't write a ton of UIs in Java either. Outside of that particular use-case its not all that common. When I do have inner classes they are generally non-trivial, at which point a couple extra lines of boilerplate is a wash really.

There's nothing wrong with Lambdas, but they're overhyped, and they can lead to some very unclear code.

I don't think your example of type erasure is even relevant.

ArrayList myStrings = new ArrayList(); ...
String tmp = (String)myStrings.get(0);

Isn't even good Java, the compiler WILL issue a warning about it. Your IDE should flag it as non-typesafe code too.

List mystrings = new ArrayList();
String tmp = myStrings.get(0);

This would be the proper way to code this. There's no issue with type erasure here, although you CAN devise some dubious uses of a generic collection where C# or C++ would throw an error EARLIER during execution than Java will. Its hardly a huge big issue. If you use unsafe constructs or reflection to invoke generic methods, well, you may get what you deserved!

What cracks me up are Java accessors and mutators that don't do any thing other than store and retrieve a value.

public void setIdiocy(SomeType idiot) {
this.idiot=idiot;
}

Just make the fields public, it is the same thing.

No it isn't, and your failure to understand the difference betrays your lack of experience with maintaining large code bases over time in the face of constant refactoring. A public field exposes the implementation of the class, a public getter/setter does not. Maybe it doesn't matter to you today, but I code with a decade from now in mind, and the trivial overhead of small extra abstractions is worth it. Now, C#'s "it looks like a field but its really an accessor" is OK, but it can confuse the uninitiated. I prefer overall a lack of these sorts of features, it doesn't take being burned twice to eat up all the benefits such a thing will ever produce.

Re:Why?

[vilanye]

The comparator is a bad thing and something that is no longer needed.

That is excess boilerplate which you seem to not understand.

A mutator that does nothing than store the value passed into it is exactly like exposing public variables. There is no difference at all.

Being able to hide the name of a variable is hardly of any value.

String tmp = myStrings.get(0);

The compiler will issue a warning because Java is as stupid as C++

You keep proving over and over that Java programmers are no better than the PHP clowns, you're just a bunch of API monkeys.

Re:Why?

[vilanye]

Damn slashdot ate my ruby code in my first post. Between the l and r is supposed to be the "spaceship" operator.

Re:Why?

[Giant Electronic Bra]

Yeah, I see it screwed up my Java code too, bleh. Anyway, you shouldn't have issues with Java and generics WRT that sort of type safety. There's never a need to explicitly cast, unless of course for whatever oddball reason you create something like List<? Extends Foo> and I frankly have never found a reason to do that.

No, it's not enough

[Anonymous Coward]

We have a LONG memory of Microsoft's past behavior.

Re:No, it's not enough

[Anonymous Coward]

We have a LONG memory of Microsoft's past behavior.

And this is why people like you shouldnt be allowed anywhere near technology, your choices arent based on technical merit or legal principles but on how a company hurt your feelings a long time ago.

Yes in the desktop wars and browser wars 20-odd years ago Microsoft said some nasty things about Linux, created proprietary plugins because of the limitations of HTML, then were ahead of the curve when they bundled a web browser with their OS (like everybody does these days) and had private APIs (like everybody does these days). But the world changed, the "EEE" idea of 2 decades ago failed every time and Microsoft has had to adapt (significantly changing its leadership personnel and strategy) to survive, litigating wasn't working so now they are releasing things as open source, they are reacting to customer feedback, the community promise is there (even if you dismiss it because you dont understand the legal principle), they have even had to make a serious effort at going multiplatform just like their competitors.

They hurt your feelings and you will never forgive them, we get that and yes, I am sure the year of the linux desktop is right around the corner ... oh wait they have systemd so we can *never* forgive them for that, i guess its BSD all the way.

Re:No, it's not enough

[JoeCommodore]

> but on how a company hurt your feelings a long time ago

I think it was a lot more than feelings, you work months to years building technologies and then Microsoft just decides to drop platform X or technology Y and there you are with all this work that was good and successful, but with Microsoft's whim, now obsolete.

After more than one such manuver, many have left for open source, where there is no single source of feature control or long-term licensing/activation/compatibility woes (not to mention fluctuating costs). Many have learned we cant depend on long term/cross platform stability with Microsoft, they are going to have to tread the long walk before they can regain respect.

Re:No, it's not enough

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it was a lot more than feelings, you work months to years building technologies and then Microsoft just decides to drop platform X or technology Y

Things like dropping Silverlight were a *good* thing, HTML5 managed to eliminate the need for proprietary tools like Silverlight and Flash so Microsoft dropping Silverlight (while Adobe is still plugging away at Flash) and now reducing support for ActiveX in favor of a plugin-less standards-compliant browser is great yet there are still people determined to try and spin it as a negative.

After more than one such manuver, many have left for open source

Mono is open source!

Re:No, it's not enough

[penguin7of9]

Apparently "we" don't have a long memory of Sun/Oracle's past behavior: Sun's repeated lies about making Java an open standard, their legal threats and lawsuits, the way they killed off independent implementations, and most recently, Oracle suing the pants of Google again. Microsoft played hardball on the business side, but Sun and Oracle have been dishonest, deceptive, and litigious. In the end, Java is both technically inferior and legally more risky than C#.

Re:No, it's not enough

[MightyMartian]

Mono is open source!

And, even if you believe MS's patent commitments, still a very crippled subset of .NET. With MS committing to bringing .NET to other platforms, I doubt Mono is even going to have a reason to exist.

Re:No, it's not enough

[MouseTheLuckyDog]

That's why I don't use either C# or Java.
I will confess to Scala, but will also say that I hope it will eventually run on LLVM.

Re:No, it's not enough

[Anonymous Coward]

the way they killed off independent implementations

Oh, come on. Visual J++ was not an "independent implementation", it was just a tool made by microsoft trying to tie java to its platform and making it non portable.

In the end, Java is both technically inferior and legally more risky than C#.

Technically inferior? How? Please elaborate. And please don't give me this "but c# has properties! but c# has operator overloading!" BS.

Re:No, it's not enough

[Anonymous Coward]

How about "C# has pointers" or "C# has unsigned types" or "C# has direct native code interoperability through function imports and exports" or "C# has proper reified generics" or "C# has allocated-on-the-stack value types" or "C# has a properly unified type system which means that you don't have to go out of your way to make an int behave like an Object or an array behave like a collection" or "C# has generator coroutines" or "C# has asynchronous coroutines" or "C# has deferred query comprehension" or "C# has transparent expression tree generation allowing for custom interpretation/execution of C# code on heterogeneous data sources" or "C# has dynamic dispatch".

Re: No, it's not enough

[Anonymous Coward]

You make some good points, but others aren't necessarily that important. Generics in Java were a complete cock-up. Not being able to get RTTI from them makes them fairly useless, though I understand the reasoning for the way they were implemented. I still don't like the result.

Having pointers, unsigned types, value types (and stack-allocation of them) is mostly about performance (and interoperability with native bindings) and really only adds needless complexity to the language.

Dynamic dispatch can be done in Java, but it's awkward and requires gobs of reflection code. I have yet to see very many examples where dynamic dispatch would be useful in Java; generally if you want loosy-goosey scripting behavior, you are better off embedding JavaScript for that purpose.

Below are good points for which I believe Java has no answer. Language support for these types of things increases complexity quite a bit, but only being able to do them via libraries is awkward and so their use in Java is quite limited. Too bad.
> "C# has generator coroutines" or "C# has asynchronous coroutines" or "C# has deferred query comprehension" or "C# has transparent expression tree generation allowing for custom interpretation/execution of C# code on heterogeneous data sources"

Re:No, it's not enough

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, "EEE" is still here and making a big comeback with Android/Objective C "bridges" in Windows 10 and Firefox/Chrome extensions in Edge. (Here's a direct quote from Myerson about the former: "We will embrace these code bases and let you extend them and distribute them through the store. It’s the same approach we’ve had historically: do what it takes for customers to embrace Windows.”)

They also keep using patents as blackmail against Android. (There was a Slashdot article on this this past April.)

Re:No, it's not enough

[Anonymous Coward]

"Sun repeated lies about making Java an open standard"?
Are you serious? Don't you know that Sun TRIED to standardize Java, but a company called Microsoft stopped that? Microsoft motivation? Microsoft said that it is not good if a single company has too much power over a standard committee, and stopped Java standardization. (Later Microsoft standardized their own MS Office file format, having the very same power over their file format, which was unsound if Sun did).

How is ...

[PPH]

... Mono support for Xlib?

Re:How is ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Excellent. You don't have to use it directly, which is the best kind of support.

Re:How is ...

[caseih]

If you mean can you write graphical Linux programs the run on x11 out Wayland, the answer is yes absolutely. Gtk and Gnome bindings were some of the earliest tools for mono. In fact monodevelop is a gtk app, written in c#. Gtk turns out to be a pretty good fit for c#

Re:How is ...

[PPH]

Nope. Can't use Wayland. It's not network transparent. We need native Xlib clients that can interoperate with remote X Windows servers.

Re:How is ...

[caseih]

Phone keyboard caused me to mistype. Gtk# works with X11 *or* Wayland. So if you wanted to use C# to make X11 applications you certainly could! Like I say they are just bindings to Gtk+, so things work just fine using whatever backends Gtk+ uses. There are bindings for Mono and C# for just about any Linux library out there also. So if you wanted to use C#, it would certainly work in your remote situation. Though personally I would just use Python.

None

[Anonymous Coward]

There are no reasons to use Mono for Linux development. None. At. All.

Re:None

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a C# developer, and I make my living in Windows.

If you want any hope of ever convincing me to bother with Linux, you need Mono.

Re:None

[MouseTheLuckyDog]

Oh my. Without you, how will we ever survive?

Re:None

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean this to come off as gently as possible. I think a fair reading of your comment tells us two things.

You will never bother with Linux, because it would require you to step out of your comfort zone(1), but if mono exists you might be able to write some applications that would work in Linux(2).

So in essence the question isn't "Do we need mono?" it is "Do we need you?"

Re: None

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry, we'll cope.

Re:None

[XaXXon]

Why should I care if you do any linux dev?

Re:None

[Anonymous Coward]

Please stay in the windows world and spare us the agony.

Re:None

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a C developer, and I don't care about puny environments. I also do assembly, COBOL and PL/1, for when the environment is a z/OS mainframe. But I just don't care.

No assertion of patents? Really?

[Microlith]

Given Microsoft’s public commitment to open source, a patent war likely isn’t going to happen; that would make the company look bad at a time when it needs all the developer support it can get.

So why don't they just relicense the .NET CLR and the rest of the packages under the Apache 2 license? It lets people use things as freely as the MIT/BSD licenses as everything else and contains the patent guarantees.

Until then, anything not under Apache 2 is suspect.

Re:No assertion of patents? Really?

[penguin7of9]

Until then, anything not under Apache 2 is suspect.

You mean like Java?

So why don't they just relicense the .NET CLR and the rest of the packages under the Apache 2 license?

Better question: why do people keep using and defending Java despite Sun's historical legal shenanigans and Oracle's litigiousness?

I mean, I can see rejecting both Java and C# (I use neither anymore), but to argue that Java is somehow OK and C# isn't strikes me as completely backwards. C# might be legally OK and Microsoft might be benign, but Java is clearly legally not OK, and Oracle clearly is anything but benign.

Re:No assertion of patents? Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean like Java?

Java or at least the OpenJDK supported by ORACLE is GPL (with class path exception). While an Apache license would have been preferable I can live with that.

Re:No assertion of patents? Really?

[penguin7of9]

The problem isn't the GPL, it's Oracle's patent portfolio, their claims to API copyrights, and their success at killing alternative implementations. And you can't live with that in the long run, because if you're a Java developer, Oracle has you by your balls.

And why would you want to live with that anyway? Java is a shitty language with a shitty runtime and shitty libraries. The only reason it's still in use is because there is so much legacy crap in it and because so many people learned it in college in their intro CS class.

Re:No assertion of patents? Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft have a patent portfolio too.

So no differentiation. Find another point.

Re:No assertion of patents? Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe that was his point.

People here are down on C# while defending Java, and it's hypocritical because Java suffers from the same ideological problems that C# does, but at the hands of Oracle instead of Microsoft. And as bad as Microsoft's behavior was 10-20 years ago, Oracle's behavior has been worse in the last 5 years.

Re:No assertion of patents? Really?

[PRMan]

Microsoft didn't sue Mono out of existence when it first appeared. In fact, they helped Miguel on many occasions. Oracle would have sued him into next week.

We'll See

[Prien715]

While I have never work in C# myself, the ability stop code in a debugger, write some code, and then continue executing (compiling your code in real-time) seemed like a really awesome feature (as a C++ guy, we don't get to do this).

The Unity engine is also quite popular and an increasingly popular choice is C# for use with it.

Maybe Microsoft can make one useful invention every decade?;)

Re:We'll See

[Anonymous Coward]

the ability stop code in a debugger, write some code, and then continue executing

I've done that in assembler some 30 years ago, insert jump into free memory add code there plus a jump back...

Re:We'll See

[Anonymous Coward]

While I have never work in C# myself, the ability stop code in a debugger, write some code, and then continue executing (compiling your code in real-time) seemed like a really awesome feature (as a C++ guy, we don't get to do this).

I've been doing this for years, and I'm a C guy. From replacing functions in VxWorks (and optionally calling them from Tcl) to hot patching with gdb.

Re:We'll See

[Megane]

(as a C++ guy, we don't get to do this)

That's because you aren't using Clang. One of the reasons Apple ditched GCC was so that they could get live recompile for Xcode.

Re:We'll See

[Giant Electronic Bra]

Maybe, but you can do this in Eclipse these days too, in Java. Its not really all that unique.

Re:We'll See

[Anonymous Coward]

While I have never work in C# myself, the ability stop code in a debugger, write some code, and then continue executing (compiling your code in real-time) seemed like a really awesome feature (as a C++ guy, we don't get to do this).

The Unity engine is also quite popular and an increasingly popular choice is C# for use with it.

Maybe Microsoft can make one useful invention every decade?;)

There are some interesting open source scripting languages out there like Angel Script which allows you to add features to games without recompiling the whole thing. This also simplifies addition of modding support and allows to choose which scripts are available in readable format. Not sure how secure the whole approach is but my friend who wrote a complete voxel engine seams to think it is a pretty good idea. At the very least it is a good idea in a single player game. Crap I had to deal with when modding Skyrim for example didn't seam very impressive in comparison.

Re:We'll See

[phantomfive]

Eclipse is much better than Visual Studio, unless you pay extra for the re-sharper plugin.

Re:We'll See

[shutdown -p now]

This is an IDE feature, not a language feature. VS can do it for C++ as well, by the way. But there's nothing stopping someone from implementing it for Java.

Re:We'll See

[BitZtream]

Hum, VisualStudio has supported Edit And Continue on C and C++ since VisualStudio 6 at least. Before C# existed you could do it in c and c++.

Still right now in VS 2013 you can do it if configured correctly

Re:We'll See

[geggo98]

This is an IDE feature, not a language feature. VS can do it for C++ as well, by the way. But there's nothing stopping someone from implementing it for Java.

Java already supports "hot swapping" of code (exchange code with a new version without stopping the program) for some time. The quality varies between different VM vendors and different development tools. E.g. the Oracle VM with Eclispe is quite limited regarding interface changes.

Re:We'll See

[Giant Electronic Bra]

Could be. I use Eclipse because it does what I need it to do. There are definitely other toolsets out there that are really good. IntelliJ has a huge rep nowadays. NetBeans is really no slouch either. Still, for enterprise development Eclipse is a workhorse. There are plugins to do everything under the Sun. Many of them are kinda less than perfect, but they work, and there's tight integration with pretty much every OSS or 'community' sort of workflow tool you would ever want.

Re:We'll See

[Anonymous Coward]

It was also mainly due to license reasons.

Re:We'll See

[PRMan]

No way. I've used both and you'll never convince me that Eclipse is better. Visual Studio is a Ferrari, Eclipse is a Yugo. I guess they'll both get you there...

Re:We'll See

[Anonymous Coward]

Cern made C++ interactive like python using clang.

https://root.cern.ch/drupal/content/cling

Re:We'll See

[phantomfive]

you'll never convince me that Eclipse is better.

"None are more blind than those who are deliberately so."

Re:We'll See

[erapert]

While I have never work in C# myself, the ability stop code in a debugger, write some code, and then continue executing (compiling your code in real-time) seemed like a really awesome feature (as a C++ guy, we don't get to do this).

Visual Studio has been able to do this for about a decade now.

So the only goot reason

[Anonymous Coward]

So the only good reason to use Mono is its IDE?
Thanks, but no thanks, I'll stay with Vim and C/C++.

Re:So the only goot reason

[OrangeTide]

While I'm very much a vi and command-line guy, I'd like to point out that Visual Studio Code already supports Linux. While it mainly markets to people using ASP.NET and Node.JS today, it appears to have some support for C++, C#, Java, Python, Rust, Lua, Objective-C, Go and others.

Don't confuse VS Code with full VS (not sure how to distinguish the two by name). You don't get all the business for doing projects from various predefined templates and build system. VS Code is more like a fancy text editor with some tools for refactor and lint.

Re: So the only goot reason

[binarylarry]

Visual Studio Code is a rip off and reskin of github's Atom editor with some Microsoft tech bolted on.

Re: So the only goot reason

[OrangeTide]

Well there's no Linux download for Atom. So I'm going to mark your comment off as hyperbole and move on with my life.

Re: So the only goot reason

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you checked back this year, already? https://atom.io/
Download .deb, Download .rpm, Build from source ...

it makes sense if...

[Anonymous Coward]

Using Mono makes sense if you have no memory for the past and no awareness of the problems caused by using other ecosystems primarily controlled by a single vendor.

Seriously. There are WAY more cross platform options available, and without all the risks that come from using something like Mono.

"Just say no" - Nancy Reagan

Not efficient

[jcdr]

I work on a embedded Linux system running Debian Jessie armhf on a Cortex-A5 processor. At some point someone programmed a Web user interface for the system using Mono for Linux. The installation of Mono was difficult, requiring several hundred Mo of space on the filesystem and some trick to get the last package revision. Then the application was started and take all the processing load for almost 4 minutes. At his point it was eating near half the memory available on that embedded system. This was socking, especially for me that like to use qooxdoo for WebUI because it's basically a static file that need no compilation and have a very minimal memory footprint. Finally the guy switched to node.js for the WebUI on that system. The installation was easy, the startup compilation last now less than a single minute and the memory footprint is below 20%, all of that with a more complete demo that with Mono.

Re:Not efficient

[Anonymous Coward]

So what you're saying is that someone chose the wrong tool for the job. Absolutely nothing to do with whether C#, Mono, .NET or any of that other stuff is any good for other jobs.

Re:Not efficient

[jcdr]

1) We didn't know that Mono was the wrong tool for that job before doing the experiment.
2) The install size is very large compared to almost anything you can actually install with a Debian Jessie main packages.
3) The performance is way slower compared to Node.js.
4) The memory footprint is a least twice the memory footprint of Node.js.

Given the results, I doubt that Mono is the right tool for any new projects. It could maybe allow to run historical C# code on Linux that rely on some .NET infrastructure, but this outside of that purpose I don't see any advantage.

Node.js has a clear and big advantage in term of installation size, processing performance and memory footprint. In addition Node.js has the sweet advantage to use the same Javascript language than on the browser client. Even if this is not simple to measure, this feature drastically reduce some kind of "brain footage" needed to deliver a project.

Re:Not efficient

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, it's hard to argue against Node.js, this develop once deploy everywhere is ridiculously good for any GUI or DB app.

Linux developers know C/C++, Python, Perl

[postmortem]

The only reason to use Mono is really to get Windows developers onboard.

But that's a long shot. Linux works because there are plenty of developers in mentioned programming languages that support it.

Since Java isn't terribly popular in Linux, .NET has no chance.

Re:Linux developers know C/C++, Python, Perl

[Dynedain]

Since Java isn't terribly popular in Linux, .NET has no chance.

Huh????? Most public facing Java service or site I've worked with as a developer have been running on a Linux box, normally RHEL or CentOS. Sometimes I've run into NetBSD, and occasionally HP-UX or Solaris.

I cannot fathom how you equate a (non-real) lack of Java development on Linux as a reason why .NET has no future there.

Re:Linux developers know C/C++, Python, Perl

[Code Herder]

I can just imagine the gp imagining the web running on all those windows boxes running Tomcat.

Re: Linux developers know C/C++, Python, Perl

[binarylarry]

I assume he means the Linux desktop. There's pretty much only the big Java IDEs there, most apps are gtk, QT, etc.

Java is probably the most common web application technology used on Linux servers today, as you noted.

Re: Linux developers know C/C++, Python, Perl

[shutdown -p now]

I very much doubt many people care about the Linux desktop. As far as platforms go, the realities of the situation today is that it's below all other desktop platforms and all mobile platforms. Note that the Microsoft effort to port .NET to Linux (.NET Core) is concentrating solely on the server side stuff: web, REST etc. And Mono has done some UI stuff, but it was always much more of a crapshoot compared to their server components.

Re: Linux developers know C/C++, Python, Perl

[Anonymous Coward]

Java is probably the most common web application technology used on Linux servers today

Except for the billions of sites running PHP.

The real question

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

What people really want to know is when will Mono incorporate systemd?

Re:The real question

[Anonymous Coward]

All that we need is for emacs to incorporate Mono. By that time emacs will also have systemd.

Re:The real question

[serviscope_minor]

What people really want to know is when will Mono incorporate systemd?

I think you mean "when will systemd incorporate mono".

Reasons to use mono

[Gravis Zero]

1) We haven't sued people for using it yet!
2) it's cross-platform (as long as you only use certain parts)
3) we have a single IDE!
4) you can write games with it... as long as it's a Microsoft console.
5) it's incomplete and buggy but were working on that!

sounds just great but why not use C++ and Qt instead?

Re:Reasons to use mono

[Anonymous Coward]

as long as it's a Microsoft console

Or PS4, Android, Linux, Mac, and iOS.

Re:Reasons to use mono

[inasity_rules]

Or basically anything that can run unity. Probably everything then... Including your toaster.

The five bullet points

[hsa]

1. C# Is a Great Language

me: Yes it is.

2. There's a Great Free IDE: MonoDevelop

me: Finding a decent IDE is not a problem anymore. You can find something for every language.

3. Mono Supports Mobile Development

me: So does Java and Swift. Why does EVERY article out there think you have to pick just ONE language and be stuck with that choice forever???

4. Mono Is Cross-Platform

me: Python, Java, C, C++, Ruby, and many, many more are all cross-platform, too!

5. Mono Powers Games Development

me: The guy is totally right. He has some great examples, too.
Please just don't think, that you MUST use C# to get into game dev. For example, you can have much faster prototyping with PyGame. You can really learn to code in Swift over a weekend, if you have mastered one similar language well.

My advice to you is: pick any language, become good at it. Just don't do VB.NET or I will have to kill you.

Re:The five bullet points

[Dwedit]

Fortunately, VB.NET can be decompiled as C# code.

Re:The five bullet points

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there any valid reason for VB.NET to still exist? Would it matter in the least if it went away tomorrow.
If you know VB.NET you can learn C# in about 15 minutes.

Re:The five bullet points

[mrchaotica]

IIRC, VB.NET is going away in the next version of .NET. (Good riddance, too!)

Re:The five bullet points

[Anonymous Coward]

Good luck analyzing the state machines that the async/await syntactic sugar compiles to!

Re:The five bullet points

[shutdown -p now]

No, it's not. In fact, they're still adding new features to the language (though largely in sync with C# now, and catching up in some cases).

Re:The five bullet points

[Anonymous Coward]

More than that. They've rewritten the VB.NET compiler in VB.NET (although some of the core parts of Roslyn used by both the C# and VB.NET compilers are written in C#), open-sourced them and have opened the design and development process to the public.

https://github.com/dotnet/roslyn/

Re:Trollbait

[MightyMartian]

Microsoft will do what it has always done; develop a technology, push it everywhere it can, then let it stagnate, and deprecate it in favor of the newest and bestest thing ever, before announcing that the next version of Windows will be the last to support it, so be sure to buy our new even more expensive suite of development and distribution tools while you can!!!!

Java is a reasonably mediocre language with a mediocre set of standard libraries, but you know what, I'm fairly confident that the application I write in Java today will still be usable in a decade (heck, I've got Java utils running that I first wrote in 2002 to 2003). In other words, Java may be far from perfect, but it is an enormous ecosystem with enormous penetration, particularly in the enterprise world. Even if I bought into the notion that C# is lightyears better than Java (which I don't), it is almost never purely about objective or subjective technological superiority.

Beyond that, if MS keeps to its word to port .NET over to other platforms, why on the hell would I want to use a crappy half-completed variant like Mono?

Yeah, that's always been my reaction

[Giant Electronic Bra]

There's about a billion times more library support for Java, particularly if you want to do anything that isn't related to Windows. And you have at least as much cross platform portability, you can reuse a lot of code for Android apps. iOS is a black hole for ALL VMs, so you really might as well just stick with Java, or else go the QT/C++ route.

Re:Yeah, that's always been my reaction

[slack_justyb]

I'll second the QT/C++ route. C++ skills are useful for more than just mobile development too! While I get that a lot of people don't like the syntax, I have to ask, which language is without sin let it cast the first stone. C++ in my most humble opinion is a really cool language and Qt (yes even with MOC) makes it even cooler. Java is alright I guess. The JavaFX seems pretty neat at the very least. C# seems like it was really popular a few years back, but now a day, I barely hear anything about it or the .NET platform for that matter. I'm surprised people are actually talking about it, but maybe I'm not hanging out with the right people or I'm just not in the right geographical region. Anyway, that's my 2 on the matter.

Re:Yeah, that's always been my reaction

[MightyMartian]

Let's put it this way. People will be writing and maintaining C/C++ and Java applications in 20 years. C# and the .NET ecosystem will amount to some old books you see getting thrown in the dumpster outside your friendly neighborhood college library. Microsoft's record of dumping it's "latest and greatest" development tools is notorious. I remember back in the day coding in FoxPro after MS had bought it, because it was going to be the big prototyping/fast development platform, before Microsoft fell out of love with it and jumped to the VB version 4-6, before they jumped to .NET with C# and VB.NET. Remember when COM-based development was the wave of the future, and everybody in their dog was building applications that amounted to bits of VB or C glue linking ActiveX controls together? Let's talk about Silverlight, that was going to kill Flash.

I guarantee you, whatever Microsoft dev platform you're using, unless your sticking to the C/C++ compilers on top of the Win core APIs, will be a distant memory, while Java and C++ with libraries like QT are still plugging along.

Re:Yeah, that's always been my reaction

[Dutch Gun]

No, that's absurd. .NET will be around for decades to come. There's too much infrastructure built on top of it, and there's no reason for Microsoft to abandon it, since it's still the modern way to write Windows applications, for both app store & full desktop applications. As long as Windows is around in its current incarnation, .NET will be around as well. Whether it will be around on *other* platforms is up for debate, but I suspect that it will at least be maintained at it's current level.

BTW, COM is still supported, and you could write a new VB6 app even today if you really wanted to. And HTML5/JavaScript killed Silverlight, not MS. Hell, it killed *Flash*, so it's a bit hard to blame that on MS.

Re:Yeah, that's always been my reaction

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft continued to develop and support Visual FoxPro until version 9.0 which was released in 2004 and supported until 2007. The interest in the language and product fell off sharply which gave them little reason to continue supporting it.

The relationship between Microsoft and Visual Basic was always shaky. They only really embraced it with Visual Basic for Applications in Office, where it is still released and supported (although the language hasn't changed appreciably since the late 90s.)

Here's a hint, though. Look at which technologies Microsoft uses themselves. Microsoft never released a commercial product using Visual FoxPro. They never developed and released a commercial product using Visual Basic (pre-.NET) either, although they did acquire a company that did. Microsoft didn't have a lot of their own skin in the game with either technology. C# and .NET are different, though. Microsoft does have a decent investment in running .NET code. A good chunk of Visual Studio is .NET/WPF. Blend is entirely WPF. WinRT is a blend of .NET and COM. Server-side they're all ASP.NET.

that's a lot of reasons

[turkeydance]

are there any good ones?

And in another 5 years

[Giant Electronic Bra]

You'll be aged out of the developer pool, so who cares? ;)

Mono: don't you get it

[Anonymous Coward]

Mono is something that Linux using teens learn about when they are pre-teens. Mono is something that friends don't share with other friends. Its embarrassing, and really, only something between you and your doctor. Linux users don't touch Mono because Mono is a contagion that shouldn't be allowed to spread. Mono: don't you get it. More specifically, when you touch it, its something that grasps on (due to patents), and doesn't ever let go (even with antibiotics). Save yourself the heartache, embarrassment and trouble: just stay away from those with Mono.

Patent Wars?

[sk999]

Why would anyone expect Microsoft to engage in such combat? Especially since the person in charge of Microsft's Open Source strategy famously wrote:

http://www.informationweek.com...

".. our PREFERRED plan is to LICENSE ... versus LITIGATE."

Gotta love Microsoft. Always thinking about our welfare. Or not.

Re:Patent Wars?

[bill_mcgonigle]

".. our PREFERRED plan is to LICENSE ... versus LITIGATE."

Hey, don't you remember when the Ruby guys filed a lawsuit in Federal Court against the Perl guys for stealing their innovations?

No, wait ... that's not how adults behave. Y'all can go piss in your kiddie pool if you want.

Re:Patent Wars?

[shutdown -p now]

Especially since the person in charge of Microsft's Open Source strategy

Bill Hilf has left Microsoft two years ago.

Re:Patent Wars?

[bmo]

Posting to remove fat-finger-mis-mod.

--
BMO

1. You want your project to fail

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember when Suse (SLED) switched to using mono for its update software. It instantly segfaulted on any attempt to run.

.Net is for Windows and Windows only

[Caesar Tjalbo]

Late '90s software development for Windows sucked. And Windows sucked because it crashed for the slightest of reasons. And there was Visual Basic. And there was the latest hype in town: Java. Roll in .Net with C# and Visual Studio. Pretty neat and fairly idiot-proof IDE, decent set of libraries, managed execution to lower the amount of BSOD's and introduce a new language to extinguish both VB and Java.

None of these reasons was relevant outside the MS world. Plenty of languages, IDE's, editors available on Linux, some say even too many. No BSOD's, no VB. Oh wait, there's one reason: that wanker Miguel de Icaza.

Re:.Net is for Windows and Windows only

[Anonymous Coward]

Visual basic is not that bad. No doubt it cannot scale, has lots of problems (and bugs. I heard that VB developers don't use VB and that is the cause of the problems) and required VERY extensive used of win32 APIs but for small scale projects (the type for most small businesses), it works fantastically well.

I was able to write a simple CRUD application in a day.

VBA is great too. Some of my "greatest" works (greatest when I was young with not much real world programming experience) was done there and that was where I learn about win32 APIs programming.

Re:.Net is for Windows and Windows only

[Anonymous Coward]

Late 90's windows development was awesome compared to early 90's windows development.
When I was writing games for windows 3.11 I needed a computer that rebooted quickly to increase productivity.
The development cycle was edit, compile, run, crash the os, reboot.

Re:.Net is for Windows and Windows only

[shutdown -p now]

I assume you're talking about the modern incarnation of VB here (i.e. the managed one, what used to be called VB.NET), since the other kind is now ancient history and has been for a long time.

Visual basic is not that bad. No doubt it cannot scale

It can scale just as well as any other statically typed .NET language. Like, say, C#

I heard that VB developers don't use VB and that is the cause of the problems

Not true. All the VS IDE bits that are specifically related to VB are written in VB. There are fewer of them now that it's all based on Roslyn, but it's still there. A lot of generic WinForms-related stuff is also in VB.

Re:.Net is for Windows and Windows only

[Anonymous Coward]

If the IT industry had not been infected by the C PLAGUE, your program would not have been able to crash your OS.

Get yourself Rust or Swift and see how Niklaus Wirth wanted the future to be ca. 1980. Bell Labs infested the world with an evil concept. The concept of a Portable Assembler. Which would help their friends to essentially hack ANY computer. Anytime, anywhere.

Welcome to Cyber Jungle. You never know when you will be bitten. You seldomly know the creature which bites you. You drop handgrenads into the dark for the beast that bit you. You are fragged by friendly fire.

Thanks, Bell Laboratories !

Re:.Net is for Windows and Windows only

[Anonymous Coward]

So, by "late 90'es", you mean XP (2000 was never a successful replacement for 98, which is why they made Windows ME)?

Because I remember developing on Windows 9x, and that was not something that required low level anything to achieve performance, it was bog standard C++ with a few loose pointers. And rebooting was what I did the most, every time I hit the "next" button in the debugger once too many.

Re:.Net is for Windows and Windows only

[Caesar Tjalbo]

The problem wasn't the (lack of) quality of VB or the popularity by its users. VB made Microsoft look bad and made it harder to attract new developers. C# was only partially an answer to things wrong with VB, perceptions from people other than VB programmers mattered a lot more.

Ugh

[Anonymous Coward]

Reason #1: because you're a moron who can't use a real language.

No. Just no. And HELL No!

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Just no. And HELL No!

If I want bloat, I've already got choices from Qt and GTK. No need to give mono/.NET devs a foothold.

After all, finding a job is a competition.
I won't run Mono-anything.
I won't run Java-anything.

Both of those libraries/languages are clearly made by people who do not understand the Unix philosophy. Do 1 thing and do that well. Do not do 50 things.

I just won't. Hell No!

Re:No. Just no. And HELL No!

[Anonymous Coward]

Dammit, when I want to mod up and my mod points have expired. Why would I want bloatware on my Linux installation? I don't, if it requires mono I look elsewhere.

And the security is fundamentally broken

[Anonymous Coward]

I was present when Brian LaMacchia explained that we could trust "Palladium", later renamed "Trusted Computing", and explained that we could trust Microsoft to do it right because if they screwed it up, the engineers would resign. I then proceeded to remind him that he had resigned from the .NET project, for which he was a primary author, when Microsoft screwed up the security. And they left it screwed up anyway, of course.

It was so fun watching Brian squirm. He hadn't expected Richard M. Stallman to be in the room, either. Watching Brian try to pretend that Palladium was about "security" instead of about DRM was incredibly funny, especially with all the private keys stored in Microsoft's not particularly locked vaults.

Re:And the security is fundamentally broken

[Anonymous Coward]

The "best" part about .NET is there's a security update at least monthly, and usually THREE DIFFERENT VERSIONS of the runtime are getting updates (why do I even need 1.x and 2.x, shouldn't they be backward compatible?), and it's one of the slowest updates to install (which I only know about because you could actually see which ones were installing under XP, but now it's just DON'T TURN THE POWER OFF 15% COMPLETE)

Re:And the security is fundamentally broken

[MightyMartian]

Yeah. Nothing says "You're computer is going to be rendered unusable for a couple of hours" like .NET updates. I swear to god I think the HD LED is just going to burn out during .NET updates. In the time it takes a .NET update to go through, I can usually update a Debian kernel and core libraries for a system and have it rebooted and already running again.

Re:And the security is fundamentally broken

[Anonymous Coward]

If your .NET updates are rendering your computer unusable for a couple of hours, you're doing something wrong, or you've got a massively shit computer.

Microsoft's Mono like the Plague

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been programming since before Microsoft existed, I remembers lots of things...

tl;dr So now I avoid Microsoft as much as is practicable. The first language I got paid to write was FORTRAN, now I get paid to write Java (cross platform, and well supported for development on Linux). I avoid Microsoft's Mono like the Plague.

We used Mono IRL with success.

[Anonymous Coward]

I work in a strictly Microsoft shop, and we do all our development in C#/.NET (customer requirement is for a Windows application -- Java doesn't have the hardware support we need). The hardware manufacturing arm of the company, which uses Linux for all their development, got tired of their home-spun tools for device bench testing/diagnostics, and wanted the equivalent of our end-user application in Linux. We were able to port our base libraries without issue, and the WinForms support in Mono was more than good enough for our UI.

I know both Java and C# (having taught Java as a grad student). After having used Mono in practice, it is easy for me to recommend development in C#/.NET for cross platform applications.

Other tools

[Anonymous Coward]

There isn't other tools?

Anyway, from what I know, mono is not a full implementation of .net framework. So I don't see how cross platform it can get.

Java is bad. But at least there are full implementation of JSE on other platforms.

Re:Other tools

[Anonymous Coward]

A full implementation of .NET would include a lot of Windows-specific code which is useless cross platform. That makes up the vast majority of what Mono doesn't implement.

Xbox Live Indie Games

[tepples]

Please just don't think, that you MUST use C# to get into game dev.

In the Xbox 360 era, C# was the only language in which to write Xbox Live Indie Games. (Technically they had to be written in verifiably type-safe CIL compatible with the .NET Compact Framework, but C# was the only major language that could compile to that.)

For example, you can have much faster prototyping with PyGame.

I've done some prototyping in Pygame, but I thought Pygame was a 2D framework, not a 3D one.

Re:Xbox Live Indie Games

[Anonymous Coward]

Mono is used by Unity 3D, the cross platform tool used to create the majority of shovelware apps and games on Apple, Google and Sony's stores. All those 8 and 16 bit knock-offs are done with Unity. It's even used as a presentation tool. Still a pile of shite mind you.

Re:Xbox Live Indie Games

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, no true developer would ever use Unity. It is only used by crappy little shovelware indy titles like: Cities In Motion 2, Oddworld: New and Tasty, Leisure Suit Larry Reloaded, Deus Ex: The Fall, Cities: Skylines, Yooka-Laylee, and some crappy little game from an unknown developer called Hearthstone.

An IDE?

[nyet]

An IDE is quite literally the least important feature of a language.

What a joke.

Re:An IDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately many software developers these days are completely lost without an IDE. For what they do, the existence of a program that will hold their hand as they develop is actually the most important thing.

Sad, but true.

Re:An IDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're not a developer are you. The IDE is *very* important if you want to be productive. In fact I would say it's critical.

Re:An IDE?

[phantomfive]

Unfortunately many software developers these days are completely lost without an IDE

These are developers you really don't want to work with.

Re:An IDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh come on. You don't seriously believe this, do you? An IDE doesn't necessarily make a developer more competent if he wasn't already, but it definitely makes him more productive.

Let's say I'm working on an unfamiliar code base and I want to know the execution flow of method A does precisely. I see that it uses method B located in another class. Using an IDE it's just a single hotkey to navigate to the relevant class file and the correct line number. Without an IDE, I would need to find the file on my filesystem first (better hope the source directories are well organized or indexed) , open it, and then find the correct lines where the function is located.

Let's say I want to know more about how a specific class or method is used. Without an IDE I would need to look it up in a pile of html documentation. An IDE would just show me a tooltip when the relevant word is selected, again saving me valuable time.

I could do all my development in sublime, notepad++. (or even vim if I'm in the mood for torture) I choose not to because a good IDE allows me to focus on the things that actually matter instead of fussing around.

Re:An IDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

They're the developers who get things done.

Re:An IDE?

[dwpro]

I just can't fathom how anyone who has used IDEs with auto-complete, syntax error highlighting, method arguments and types displayed inline, following methods by jumping between files, step-through debugging, automatic compilling, etc. could ever go back to plain old text editor coding. That "hand holding" is fantastic, and to me _is_ the most important thing. The amount of time and mental energy wasted doing the busy work of orchestrating a project and fixing minor bugs that could be immediately seen or quickly tracked down by hand can make some coding not worth the effort. It does give me a kick though, to come to /. and hearing the crufties bitch about advanced tools. I hypothesize that you guys developed a command line fetish while watching the scrolling text of gentoo to recompiles and can't get jollies without it. I really can't explain the fascination otherwise.

Re:An IDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with you that having a good IDE that does all the little things for you is a godsend.
However, it's a godsend when you ALREADY KNOW how to do without an IDE and debugger.
If you have no idea what's behind the pretty autocompletion and graphics, you will be lost when the automated stuff fails you or is simply not available.

Every programmer should do one small application using only a text editor and printfs for debugging. Then rm -Rf it and start a proper IDE :)

Re:An IDE?

[mvdwege]

Then it's good neither the AC nor phantomfive were making that argument, now were they?

If you read customer requirements as well as you show you read a two-line slashdot post, I shudder to think of what code quality your customers get.

Re:An IDE?

[Psychotria]

They're the developers who get things done.

You misunderstood the parent. They said:

Unfortunately many software developers these days are completely lost without an IDE

This is quite different to saying, for example, "Here is a developer who can continue to function without an IDE". I agree with the parent... many developers these days cannot function without an IDE; without one they have no clue where to start.

Re:An IDE?

[dwpro]

if you guys would quit stripping down to show off your e-peens you've grown by not needing an IDE to develop, you might not get such a chill at a dissenting opinion.

Re:An IDE?

[nyet]

No, they're the developers I have to hand hold for hours at a time, and the ones whose code I have to fix because they're incompetent.

Re:An IDE?

[phantomfive]

. That "hand holding" is fantastic, and to me _is_ the most important thing.

What do you want me to say? You suck? Seriously, if your codebase is so complex that it can't be understood without autocomplete, I don't want to work with your code. Or you. Your code needs better organization, improve your skill.

Re:An IDE?

[dwpro]

Do you actually know what autocomplete is? It has nothing to do with _understanding_ code. I bet you intended a more nuanced criticism but didn't have an autocomplete for the enumerated benefits so you just went with the first one. I'll try an organize my arguments better so that it matches your expected responses, improve my skill.

Re:An IDE?

[phantomfive]

Do you actually know what autocomplete is? It has nothing to do with _understanding_ code.

Some people write code so bad that it can't be understood without autocomplete (and other IDE navigation tricks). You just can't find where stuff is without it, because the code is not well organized.

Glad to hear your code is not like that.

Re:An IDE?

[Anonymous Coward]

An IDE ISN'T a feature of a language (at least not for a SANE language).

Re:An IDE?

[mvdwege]

I'm not bothered by dissenting opinions. I'm bothered by reflexively produced bullshit showing neither reading nor thinking ability.

Re: Trollbait

[Anonymous Coward]

You win the dipshit award. "Convicted monopolist" is a phrase cunts use. And Microsoft is not giving up on .net you liar. Your attempt at FUD is risible.

Mono is a piece of crap.

[Anonymous Coward]

Mono is such a steaming pile of shit, that if you want to run it on anything that is not GNU/Linux, it crashes. Have test suite written in .NET and it needs to run on Solaris, too? Too bad, one is royally screwed.

And what about the fact that it is always lagging behind the .NET reference platform on Windows?

Total crap, runs only on GNU/Linux. Talk about voluntary vendor lock in. Technology which thrills!

Suitability of Mono aside, he says

[AmazingRuss]

"Chief among them is MonoDevelop, which he claims is an excellent IDE; " ... which made my jaw drop.

Monodevelop is a fucking awful, AWFUL piece of software. Bloated, slow, and broken hundreds of ways.

Re: Trollbait

[cyber-vandal]

They've "abandoned" it even though they're about to release C# 6 and a complete rewrite of ASP.NET called vNext which is being released as open source. Or do you have secret insider knowledge that they're planning to rewrite ASP.NET again in Javascript?

Chris Knight

[ChadSmith4920]

"There are a lot of decaffeinated brands on the market today that are just as tasty as the real thing."

Assuming it is a question

[Anonymous Coward]

If it was a question then the answer would be "None"

If I want real cross-platform

[Albu]

I use Haxe http://haxe.org/.

MonoDevelop is the key point here.

[Qbertino]

MonoDevelop/Xamarin Studio FOSS Edition is the key point here.

I have to admit, I resent MS just as much as the next guy and I consider C# a half-assed cross between readability of C, speed of Java and portability of Visial Basic and unlike some MS fans do not consider the PL the second coming of Christ. ... But (you did see a big "but" coming up there, right?) I have to say that MonoDevelop is an impressive FOSS product. It works out of the box on Linux, OS X and Windows, it's actually a pretty good IDE and it makes getting up and running with C# GUI/client development a breeze.

You can get from zero C# experience to an own feasible GUI app in a matter of hours.
Something I can't say of other great toolkits, such as Qt.

In a nutshell, MonoDevelop is the only reason I would actually even consider C# as a PL for a project.
And now with major components of the .Net ecosystem available as FOSS, I wouldn't completely dismiss C# for non-trivial infrastructure and middleware either.

My 2 cents.

Given it doesn't implement .NET

[Anonymous Coward]

Only the (currently allowed, in principle they can add more to the "licensed use only" list) open spec, it is entirely unworkable to use Mono for development in Linux since the programs allowed will be a neutered and worthless subset of what would be done if the language were actually open.

Moreover, the patenting licenses of .NET means that including the methodologies of .NET, which Mono has to do, infects your code with Microsoft licensing.

A number of major problems

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Patent issues
2. Need to ship mono runtime - It is difficult to ship programs to end users with it. If you build GTK# programs, and want to ship binaries, you also have to ship all of GTK to have something that works everywhere. This makes your distribution huge. If you build programs with windows forms, they will have modal dialogs, and other horrible windowsisms that aren't acceptable in Linux world. However, at least in this case, you can ship a working mono with graphics, providing you are very careful to package its dependencies.
3. Slow execution times - much too slow for things like complex games.
4. Dependency on runtime.
5. Mono is NOT cross platform. There are subtle differences in behaviour on different platforms, and there is no common gui toolkit.
6. Monodevelop is not the best IDE.
7. It is incomplete and often very buggy.

Why use Linux at all?

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean, Microsofts development philosophy is so much better. Maybe its time to switch to their operating system as well?

If you're young or your memory is failing...

[Anonymous Coward]

... using .net/Mono may make sense.
If you remember how Microsoft threatened Linux developers only a few years ago, and how many "technologies" they crammed down Windows' users throats only to abandon them shortly after, not so much.

Also, Re: Game Development. The original author is an idiot that thinks gaming == xbox. The console designed for... watching TV. No thank you.

Don't let Mono wean developers away from Linux

[keneng]

Microsoft is the Anti-Christ. This tool does not benefit the community. Using gcc/c++ benefits the community. Using Mono only benefits Microsoft because that encourages everyone to try Mono and then the developers end of feeling limited on the Linux MONO IDE because it is deliberately crippled with less bells and whistles than the MICROSOFT WINDOWS-BASED .NET IDE.

The bottom-line long-term strategy for Microsoft is to suck money out of developers pockets on an ongoing basis. Their agenda about Linux was revealed years ago with the "halloween papers" their real strategy was "Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt" towards Linux;"Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" Linux. For as long as Linux afficionados remain vigilant, that's not going to happen if Linux developers continue to use gcc/g++. I clearly recommend ignoring all Microsoft offerings on an eternal basis. I look forward to the day that Microsoft is irrelevant in the software domain. Move on. Nothing to see here.

Which architectures does Mono work on?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently not everything that Linux runs on:

http://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=mono&suite=sid

Sure, there's considerable patent risks...

[Anonymous Coward]

And sure, Microsoft has a history of douchebaggery. But look at how nice the IDE is! An C# is nice too! So fuck the risks, gimme the shiny shiny! /sarcasm

(ok, I admit, C# and its libraries really are pretty nice)

We already have nice languages that are cross platform, mobiley, with IDE support (hello, Python). Why take such risks for the sake of shiny development tools?

What? Mono still exists?

[walterbyrd]

I thought that was gone five years ago.

Reason not to:

[slashdice]

Miguel de Icaxaka is a known Microsoft acolyte (even in the Ballmer days). Furthermore, he's been known to eat his own dick cheese.

He has done more to harm Linux than anyone, other than Lennard "systemD" Poetering.

Yeah, .NET won't die

[Giant Electronic Bra]

I don't think MS is going to 'stop supporting' .NET. Hell, Visual FoxPro 9 SP2 was released as late as 2007 and there were hotfixes released as late as 2010. Granted, MS hasn't really supported it in a big way in about 10 years, but it was a LOOOOONNNNNGGGGG time 'dying', and there are still quite a few users.

Even if .NET were to follow VFP its going to have active support for AT LEAST the next 10 years. Given that MS has no other similar product or reason to ditch this one in favor of another, as well as various active ongoing technology programs that build on the .NET CLR it hardly seems likely to fade very fast.

I think what MS has determined is that their boundless enthusiasm for managed code was a bit over-the-top. It makes sense as an approach for 'apps' and less-demanding or 'internal use' type applications. I think they've also realized that the real value of such an environment is in Java's niche, as a high performance platform-agnostic host for business logic. Unfortunately for them they'll never displace Java in that niche. That boat has sailed.

Still, MS itself will in all probability continue to write .NET applications. C++ is a great language, but it takes a huge amount of effort to deal with memory management issues and such crap. C++ is also a language filled with lots of pitfalls. It is incredibly easy to write bad C++ code, and you really need to study the language itself for a few years just to be a truly competent coder. Frankly I just stick to Java, but if I was a .NET guy I'd just stick with that. Why not?

I wonder about HTML5/Javascript. Personally I think Javascript is another terrible language. We're kind of stuck with it, but between the terribleness of HTML, the terribleness of the DOM, and the terribleness of JS writing UIs in that environment really is a pretty awful and expensive process. We've found that with JavaFX (and no doubt other equally good toolsets) we can write a UI in 1/2 or 1/3 of the time it takes to do the same quality of work in HTML/JS. While it is certainly not going anywhere in the near future I have to see this whole paradigm as ripe to fall. MS may think they've hitched their wagon to the final answer, but IMHO something much better will come along before too much longer.

Re:Yeah, .NET won't die

[Dutch Gun]

C++ is a great language, but it takes a huge amount of effort to deal with memory management issues and such crap. C++ is also a language filled with lots of pitfalls. It is incredibly easy to write bad C++ code, and you really need to study the language itself for a few years just to be a truly competent coder.

While the rest of your statements are true enough, C++ (as of C++ 11) is pretty easy to use in terms of memory management. As long as you use smart pointers and proper RAII techniques, memory management is almost as automatic as with a managed language. My new game / game engine was written in 100% modern C++, and I've had incredibly few memory issues. For the most part, as long as I properly manage object lifetime, I don't even have to think about memory management, which is quite a relief even for this long time C++ programmer.

Unfortunately, there's a *huge* amount of legacy code out there that uses a lot of old and unsafe techniques that make it so difficult to use correctly and safely. It's going to be quite a few more years before we see a proper transition of these techniques, but if C++ has anything going for it, it's stubborn longevity.

Re:Yeah, .NET won't die

[Giant Electronic Bra]

Yeah, that's the problem. You never know what sort of bad code you're calling in some library. You can try to use only the latest and greatest stuff, but that comes with a price too, and a lot of really critical functionality only exists in really old code that will probably never get cleaned up.

The other problem is that for people like me, who have done only limited amounts of C++ coding, the language is especially treacherous. Its great that it HAS ways to do things 'right', but it also has ever evil bad way to do it wrong, and learning the difference really does take years.

Bollocks

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing super-complicated can ever ever ever be whipped out in no time and no thought.

Re: Bollocks

[Anonymous Coward]

^ this

Suse Dropped Mono with SLED12

[perotbot]

Suse used Mono in SLED 9-11 from several things, but specifically Novell's ifolder implementation. With SLED 12, mono is no longer available. Considering that Suse/Novell used to employ the most of the mono team. but no longer, it may be obvious that this is a dead end

Eclipse? Dont you mean IntelliJ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Eclipse better than VS? I'm pretty sure you mean IntelliJ. Eclipse is terrible. Comparison only makes sense between VS+ReSharper to IntelliJ (ReSharper and IntelliJ are JetBrains products) NOT something awful like Eclipse.

now that's easy,

[Anonymous Coward]

none! Use Python for Pete's sake!

GPL/LGPL are obsolete for platforms these days.

[goruka]

Nowadays, every language implementation and compiler has been released under a very permissive license. If the guys from Xamarin would try stopping making money out of Mono I'm sure it would become a lot more popular. For example:

-LLVM (BSD)
-Lua,Python, Ruby, etc. (BSD Style)
-CoreCLR (MIT style)
-Dalvik (for Java)

Even GCC runtime license is more permissive. Mono is a dual licensed commercial product, so I'm surprised Slashdot is making publicity out of it.

Because Microsoft already does Patent abuse?

[coder111]

Ok, MS doesn't do patent abuse when it concerns .NET (yet).

But all Android vendors have to pay up to Microsoft for all the Linux/Android based phones they sell, because of patents. This is extortion pure and simple, and it's Microsoft abusing patent system for monetary gain.

--Coder

Patents aren't my primary concern

[Shaitan]

Mono has and always will have a subset of the functionality and ecosystem available to .Net windows developers. If a developer builds their skills around .Net using mono it's only a matter of time before the benefits of using .Net on that platform outweigh the benefits of using Linux for that developer, that project, that company. Sooner or later more jobs being available for those with .net skillsets on windows or higher paying jobs will mean mono developers taking those jobs which leads to more professional experience on that platform and rinse and repeat.

Mono is a sinkhole designed to drain developers away from Linux. Stay away from traps, use tools that provide superior capabilities on your already superior platform and build your skills and experience on those.

I have two more reasons

[Anonymous Coward]

- If you are a retard that can't clean his own shit than C# is the right language for you!
  - If you are a moron that believes for a single second that Microsoft become over the nigh a selfless company, than than C# is the right language for you!

What about technical issues?

[Anonymous Coward]

What about technical issues such as recompiling (almost?) the whole of mono just to add in a new baud rate?
Everything is built like a house of cards with so much omni potato gobble de gook crappulent interdependencies and MOOD APIs
(DOOM spelt backwards). By the time all the dots are joined, it spells microshaftees at work AGAIN.
Nothing has changed then.

Welcome

[snadrus]

Welcome to the vast variety of languages on Linux with the attributes you have. Unfortunately you're still an underperformer in:
- Speed: Plenty of faster-running and faster-compiling (or not compiling) languages to chose from
- Convenience: Python, Perl, Bash, PHP are all lighter-weight, easier setup, & ready-to-go
- License: It matters to the free-software community.
- Self-Competition: Killed D-Lang, Harmed Rust (Co-routines). You've got it (Microsoft CLR runtime) and we all know that's trouble.
- Packaging: Installing Mono-based apps into a non-Mono box are huge.
- Tooling: Experienced devs live here & expect standards. Leave the standards & you've left the community.

So for every purpose there's a better tool (except running code from devs who won't leave Windows). Since devs are leaving faster than ever and universities have all-but-abandoned Windows in CS education, this category is too small to matter. As for legacy software, it'll stay on Windows for fears that it's not as platform-independent as people think (see Java @ 2005), so it's not even an exception.

Re:Trollbait

[PPH]

convicted monopolist

Nope. They settled with the DoJ and consented to an agreement overseen by a FISA judge.

So, lots of NSA backdoors. But no conviction.

Re:Trollbait

[Anonymous Coward]

> Java is a reasonably mediocre language with a mediocre set of standard libraries, but you know what, I'm fairly confident that the application I write in Java today will still be usable in a decade

This. Java is the COBOL for the new century, but COBOL has served us way better than most Microsoft tech, with the possible exception of win32 whose only hope of survival is with wine and reactOS. You go MS only if you have enough dev power and want to milk the clients for needless updates. Which was great in the 90s but now is becoming kind of a risky business.

Re:Trollbait

[Gamasta]

Sure they're still running, but just because java takes forever to execute.

Knock knock. Who's there? (long pause) Java

Say no to Mono

[chris_clay]

With various GNU/Linux distributions, Mono support is spotty and therefore I'd steer clear of it entirely. Why do we need it? We don't. We're much better off with native frameworks that are better suited to the GNU/Linux OS itself. Such as Python for example.

beats me!

[Giant Electronic Bra]

I wouldn't say Java is utterly consistent. Its pretty generic though, and I like that. If you know C you can pretty well understand the flow of code in a Java method, and if you have a general understanding of OOP then you will pretty much understand Java. I think the same can be said for C#.

Frankly I was considering using a scripting language to write some test driver code. I figured it would be a little less tedious and easier, but what I found was that with a modern IDE it just wasn't worth the bother. Yeah, I could make my test harness a little simpler, and in theory I could even edit it without recompiling, but it was just plain easier to write the stuff in Java, its just not that hard to code in.

I mean there are very definite use cases for scripting, but its not like the old days where it was much easier than coding in a compiled language.