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Why Mono doesn't suck

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Re: Why Mono doesn't suck

#51

Post by jm4 »

stcredzero wrote: post #31
jm4 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a cost. Many IT people/developers like to think otherwise but to do so is truly delusional and can be a roadblock to career advancement.

It may be delusional to not deal with the software is viewed. But the thought that it's strictly a cost is itself a delusion. I have seen firsthand corporations being choked by bad software. (A certain cell phone manufacturer and a certain car rental company come to mind.) I've also experienced good customer service enabled by flexible software, where I'm amazed, "You can really do that?" Amazon wouldn't be nearly as…

I understand your point and I agree that software could make or break a company. That can be true and you could still make the argument that IT is strictly a cost. That IT departments can enable other departments to reduce their own costs does not change the fact that IT itself is a cost.

In your customer service example IT has clearly had a positive impact, but you'd be hard pressed to convince anyone that the IT department is generating revenue for the company. If you walked into the CFO's office trying to make that case you'd be laughed out of the room. Good customer service does not manifest itself through good software.

A better approach may be to walk into the CFO's office and show how your IT department is helping the company realize it's goal of providing good customer service at an acceptable cost. It's a very subtle distinction. This is what I was getting at when I said not thinking of IT as a cost can be a roadblock to advancement.

Re: Why Mono doesn't suck

#52

Post by wvenable »

patrickg-zill wrote: post #42

Mono comes from the same makes-Linux-slow team as the people who "gifted" us with Gnome. Who are these guys really working for?

Python must be developed by the makes-Linux-frozen-in-time team then. And don't even get me started on KDE! If you're not running Linux as God intended, from the command line and programming only in C, you are part of the problem.

Re: Why Mono doesn't suck

#54

Post by philwelch »

rbanffy wrote: post #39
TomOfTTB wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you miss the point. They already have market. Most Corporate Networks run on Windows Servers. What Mono does is allow those Windows shops with their .Net experienced developers to start experimenting with and hopefully integrating Linux. Without having to change the language and framework they've standardized on. In that way it gives Linux an inroad it didn't have before Mono.

"In that way it gives Linux an inroad it didn't have before Mono." No, it doesn't. For internal development you have a wide variety of options. Java is quite good and very popular among those who consider the option of not running their wares under Windows. The only way Mono can appeal to Windows-only houses is by making it possible to run unmodified (and proprietary) products that run under Windows on other platform…

"For internal development you have a wide variety of options. Java is quite good and very popular among those who consider the option of not running their wares under Windows. The only way Mono can appeal to Windows-only houses is by making it possible to run unmodified (and proprietary) products that run under Windows on other platforms."

I'm working at a Windows-only house with internally built .NET apps. Mono is definitely part of our long term plans to run these apps on other platforms.

Re: Why Mono doesn't suck

#55

Post by jasonkester »

h1bored wrote: post #48
jasonkester wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've piqued my curiosity. What are you using Mono for if not to run C# outside of Windows?

We're running C# code, and increasingly some F#, but not at all interested in taking desktop or web applications from Windows and dropping them onto Macs or Linux. We're historically a microsoft shop but recently (in the last 18 months or so) have started running linux backend servers for many of our services running on EC2. If I wanted to be buzzword compliant I'm sure I could come up with some string of cloud nonse…

Sounds like we're doing similar stuff. The code I'd like to run under Mono is neither ASP.NET nor WinForms. It's plain vanilla string processing and HttpRequesting with some minor crypto and SSL thrown in to use AWS.

That's the stuff I'd expect to be there and it's not.

Re: Why Mono doesn't suck

#56

Post by bretthoerner »

jasonkester wrote: post #29
limmeau wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"your only goal should be" or "I want you to"? Perhaps they just want to be able to program in a decent statically-typed language with a GC and a JIT compiler and Gtk bindings?

That seems like a reasonable thing to want to do, and a worthy reason to split off a fork. It's certainly not worth hijacking as big or important a project as Mono to do so. Mono needs to get a direction and follow it. At the moment, they're heading in a bunch of directions at once. If they don't want to be "A .NET Runtime That Works Anywhere", then they should say as much and stand aside so that somebody else can do…

> hijacking

Uh, people are giving their time to create what they need / want. Welcome to open source, right? I don't think it's possible to "hijack" an open source project. As said above: patches are probably welcome.

In the end it just sounds like you want free support from a company like Microsoft/Novell without paying a dollar.

Re: Why Mono doesn't suck

#57

Post by chaostheory »

TomOfTTB wrote: post #7
davidw wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and no. I think that, given all the money and hard work poured into it, Mono is, relative to other languages and things out there, not as popular as it "ought" to be. Here we have a first-rate JIT compiled language that's completely free (no Java ambiguity), with a team of smart hackers behind it, and yet not that many people use it. I don't, nor do I know anyone who does, besides one of the core developers who l…

Well as the head of an IT department that does use Windows servers I can tell you you're right but the reason has little to do with Mono itself. Here's the thing you have to understand about corporate IT: Support is king. Unlike startups which are filled with technical people company's have only a few IT people and usually only one whose knowledge is at a high enough level to even think of editing the source of an op…

I'm going to disagree. Based on experience, this is still the root of the problem: "Secondly, support for Microsoft.NET is a secondary goal for Mono"

Maybe Mono is great for smaller agile shops who can somehow work around that (most likely since they don't have a lot of legacy code - or they can start from scratch), but at the big corp I work for it just doesn't work. Many of our teams couldnt get our major projects running without major issues on mono without significant work (which wasn't undertaken).

Re: Why Mono doesn't suck

#58

Post by anshul »

jasonkester wrote: post #34
h1bored wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lead a dev team in the real world, using mono for all our work, and I don't need them to do any such thing. Your definition of the "ONLY" goal for them is utter claptrap and certainly not a definition of what the "real world needs". Stop confusing your desires ("Simply make my C# code work there, and I'll be happy") with the only sane direction for them to go. I certainly wouldn't thank them for slavishly copying .…

You've piqued my curiosity. What are you using Mono for if not to run C# outside of Windows?

I have never programmed with .NET (been coding exclusively in linux for years), but the framework looks interesting and the WPF has caught my eye. I will probably be one of those who will be exclusively learning the mono version of the .NET story and C#/F#. Though I guess there are very few people in my boat.

Re: Why Mono doesn't suck

#59

Post by anshul »

TomOfTTB wrote: post #9
mishmash wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The other sees this as some kind of holy war and is really just using Linux to act like drama queens." No need to deride an entire class of your peers simply because their ideals are different than yours.

It's not their ideals it's that they express them in a way that's counterproductive and designed to draw attention to themselves and not participate in a discussion. Let me give you another example of this type of behavior. I personally disagreed with many of the decisions the Bush Administration made in the U.S. I have had many thoughtful discussions with people who thought differently and have, in some cases, chang…

The guy down the road might not have convinced anyone directly but he did contribute to your cause by making the need for discussing GWB ever so slightly stronger in your community enabling you to do what you did.

Re: Why Mono doesn't suck

#60

Post by utnick »

jasonkester wrote: post #47
utnick wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What 1.1 things don't work? I thought they were fully 2.0 compatible? It has been quite good in my experience, obviously if you are doing windows specific things like registry or security it won't work, but that is to be expected.

Ah, but security isn't windows-specific. It's essential if you want to use anybody's APIs that require SSL (and sometimes have broken certs). And it doesn't work in Mono today. This could possibly be fixed by now, but last I tried, the C# sample code to interact with Amazon S3 didn't run under Mono.

I'm not familiar with the S3 .net api.. but linux doesn't have the notion of central certificate store like windows does. Therefore if you are relying on that existing, you are going to need to change your code.

It is certainly possible to use SSL with mono, many people do it.

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