On Wed, 2002-02-06 at 21:07, Paul M Foster wrote:
> de Icaza knows much more than I do about the .Net platform, and he may
> well be right about a lot of it. It may be that Microsoft finally sat
> down and did something mostly right (particularly when Miguel talks
> about the bytecode implementation). And in theory, .Net as a cross
> platform platform is a good idea, just like Java was. de Icaza talks
> about developers loving this .Net stuff. I don't know how true that is.
> My take is that there are still a lot of misgivings and hesitation, even
> among the Microsoft shops.
>
> Miguel wants to develop this .Net workalike on the Linux (and other)
> platforms, where he knows Microsoft won't go. He wants to do it because
> he admires the technology and believes that it will multiply the
> productivity of coders. Well and good. But expect Microsoft to torpedo
> this by playing the shell game with APIs or other little tricks. They
> did it with SMB, they did it with Kerberos, and they'll do it with .Net
> if they believe it "chokes off the air" from Mono.
What I don't understand is how the .NET CLI is any different from a Java
JVM. They're still bytecode interpreters and they are both going to
have the same problems that keep a lot of developers away from using
Java - primarily performance-related. They're great for server-side
apps, where it's all just sitting around and thinking about numbers, but
try to do anything interactive, i.e. with a GUI, and Java falls on its
face faster than an 18-month old with a shot of bourbon inside him.
I suspect the way the .NET stuff gets around this problem is by calling
the Win32 GUI APIs natively and doesn't try to do any of it itself. At
which point, you're losing most of the niceness of having a language-
and platform-independent system like Java or the .NET stuff. So on a
Linux platform, those .NET API calls will have to call out to GTK or
what-have-you directly to get a similar environment.
Since there already exist bindings for glib, GTK, etc, in many different
languages, I'm not following Miguel's logic that using the .NET
framework will increase programmer productivity by allowing them to use
any language they want - they already can.
And like you say Paul, all Microsoft has to do is periodically change
those APIs to keep the Mono people just one step behind. Miguel even
essentially admits defeat in this area by saying that Mono has
effectively NO class library while the Microsoft .NET stuff is already
at a v1.0.
Perhaps there's more to it, but I'm not really following. All I see is
Miguel getting excited about a new language the same way so many people
get excited about Perl, Python, Java, C, C++, LISP, Eiffel,
name-your-own-language.
> SOAP/XML is another little piece of this. I don't know much about this,
> but Microsoft's promotion of it is that they will do everything in XML
> from now on, to make it easier for everything to interoperate with
> everything else. Only problem is, from what I've read, they're torturing
> XML. When you embed a lot of binary crap in XML, you defeat the whole
> purpose of it. And as I understand it, this is what they're doing.
Right. When Microsoft says "We use XML for everything now" what the
mean is "We use XML wrappers around COM objects for everything now."
Hardly the same.
> Bottom line is that while I laud Miguel's enthusiasm and his technical
> proficiency, I think in the end he's going to get shafted by one of the
> biggest shafters on the planet.
Hard to dispute with all the evidence from past events.
--
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usage: qrpff 153 2 8 105 225 < /mnt/dvd/VOB_FILENAME \
| extract_mpeg2 | mpeg2dec -
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/Gallery/
http://www.eff.org/ http://www.anti-dmca.org/
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