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Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

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Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#611

Post by johansch »

OWaz wrote: post #125
jacquesm wrote: post #77

It's funny how Nadella has moved the needle more for developers in 9 months than Ballmer did in the last decade or so, and all that without running around like a madman too. Pretty good. I'll never switch back to MS for what they've done in the past but it is nice to see them try hard to become a nicer player in the software eco-system. Google and Apple need some other party to keep them sharp, it might as well be MS…

Seeing comments like this “I'll never switch back to MS for what they've done in the past” always reminds me of this post from Hanselman http://www.hanselman.com/blog/MicrosoftKilledMyPappy.aspx

http://news.microsoft.com/microsoft-senior-leaders/

How many of the "non-criminal new microsoft generation" do you see there? My guesstimate: 33%

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#612

Post by bad_user »

icantthinkofone wrote: post #482
bad_user wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've also been pretty unforgiving about things that Microsoft did in the past to crush competing web browsers, competing standards like OpenGL or ODF, Linux or open-source in general. And sorry, but I do not agree with that article by Hanselman. Thing is, I treat companies like I treat people. Legally speaking, isn't that what they want, in the US anyway? So if you violate my trust, it's goodbye until I see serious a…

>...things that Microsoft did in the past to crush competing web browsers, competing standards like OpenGL or ODF, Linux or open-source in general. >I must say that with this move I'm finally ready to forgive Microsoft. Well that didn't take much.

Well, it's not a single event thing, but a series of events.

Upgrading IExplorer to something that can be called a modern browser and helping to estinguish IExplorer 6 is another event. Replacing Balmer was another event. Partnering with Xamarin (instead of crushing them with patents) was another event. Releasing Office Mobile for Android and iOS was another event. Etc...

As to why they are doing this, I don't really care as long as they are aligned with my needs. Plus I'm allowed to change my mind, depending on my mood :-)

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#613

Post by bphogan »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #313
tlb wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious whether, with the fullness of technological hindsight, you still deplore what they did to Netscape. Microsoft was the first to release a free browser included with the OS. That killed Netscape's business of selling browsers on a CD for $40, and Netscape was understandably upset. It now seems clear that an OS needs a browser included, at least so you can read documentation and download the browser of your…

The problem with them including IE with windows was that IE wasn't following standards. The idea was to force the server market to tend towards IIS instead of other servers. Netscape cared because they made their real money from server software.

And this is really important to remember. For a good time in the 2000s I worked on software that only worked in IE because the "tech people" thought that "Windows Integrated Authentication", where you would just automatically be logged into a web app if you used IE + IIS as the server, was more secure.

It was a nightmare of coupling, and it's one of the reasons that IE was so hard to get rid of in the enterprise.

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#614

Post by frowaway001 »

bad_user wrote: post #568
jbooth wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that's good, sorry for asking. I've had a lot of people point at the big-0 notation of that linked-list append and tell me that it's faster than an ArrayList append on average. Usually this is right after telling me that "I just don't get it" with immutable collections. So I hope you can see why I'd react that way. As I'm sure you know, when it comes to real-world situations, reducing inter-thread communication…

> You shouldn't have read contention with locking in the first place unless it's for a very good reason. True, but you know how it is in practice :-) For example I found that using persistent data-structures work best when you've got single producer, multiple consumers scenarios - so you mutate some state and you want to signal it over asynchronous boundaries to multiple consumers. With an immutable data-structure yo…

Nice effort, but judging from the non-sense emitted by jbooth, he won't understand the things you are explaining anyway.

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#615

Post by makomk »

lawl wrote: post #294

Can anyone clarify for me, does this include WPF? I remember I wanted to run a few apps off github on linux and they used WPF, which mono doesn't support. Otherwise mono seemed to run pretty much everything i threw at it. Can someone with .NET experience clarify for me what this will enable that mono doesn't (yet)? In other words, if .net will continue to be riddled with windows only API's I'm not really interested.…

No WPF from what I can see, it's just core stuff, ASP.Net and (proprietary?) Android/iOS support. WPF and Windows Forms appear to be remaining closed source and Windows-only.

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#616

Post by frowaway001 »

eloisant wrote: post #317
jkrems wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's why you would use F# in .NET if you want something like Scala. And then I heard many people say that .NET wins again.

F# is not really like Scala in the sense that it's more "extreme" in terms of FP, you can't easy fallback on more classical patterns if FP doesn't work well for your problem.

> F# [...] more "extreme" in terms of FP

In the sense of lacking higher-kinded types and typeclasses?

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#617

Post by daveloyall »

300bps wrote: post #465
jacquesm wrote: post #77

It's funny how Nadella has moved the needle more for developers in 9 months than Ballmer did in the last decade or so, and all that without running around like a madman too. Pretty good. I'll never switch back to MS for what they've done in the past but it is nice to see them try hard to become a nicer player in the software eco-system. Google and Apple need some other party to keep them sharp, it might as well be MS…

I'm not sure if there is any topic I am passionate enough about to post 22+ comments on a single HN news story about. You must really, really dislike Microsoft.

The wolf hasn't even finished zipping up the crude sheepskin costume and folks are announcing their plans to go visit it. It's alarming! :/

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#618

Post by freehunter »

srean wrote: post #577
freehunter wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point there is literally nothing Microsoft can do to win these people over. They've done everything they could do short of porting the Windows UI to Linux (and even then... this and Powershell brings it pretty close). They're a huge contributor to open source, they support Linux pretty heavily on Azure, they open sourced their .NET as seen here, they listened to their customers on Windows 10, they're doing gr…

Well as your parent post indicates MS did a lot of bad shit. "oh I screwed you mommy over again and again, no worries, no foul, now we are chums, lets be all buddy buddy and sing Kumbaya in a circle" doesnt work all that well in practice and neither should it. That is what learning from past experiences is about. When a behavior gets institutionalized, it is likely to repeat more often than not. It requires exception…

Yes, but as my post indicates, they've done a lot of good stuff since the bad stuff they did 20 years ago. They've had exceptional evidence and time, but hating Microsoft is just the thing to do in some IT circles. It doesn't matter what MS does, the cool kids will still hate them.

And that's fine. I just don't want to hear about it. You're mad. We get it. You don't have to like them, all we ask is that you stop bringing it up in every thread. See also: bringing up Google Reader in every Google thread or bringing up the NSA in every thread about cloud providers. We know bad things happened. But you're still dragging the thread off-topic.

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#619

Post by seanmcdirmid »

frowaway001 wrote: post #605
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went from scala to C# 7 years ago, and after some feature withdrawal, I began to like C# for its simplicity. It was not very elegant, I often had to settle for ugly solutions, but this was actually a step up from scala where I would obsess to find the most elegant solution for my code. In C#, the best way is more obvious even if not that good, and you settle more quickly. As the language is considered holistically…

> they don't make dubious decisions (getting rid of semi colons) that are theoretically sound but screw up tooling Wait WUT? I'm not sure you know what you are talking about ... that just doesn't make any sense. Scala 7 years ago is fundamentally different from today's Scala, so I'm not seeing how your experience is relevant anymore.

Taking out semi colons reduced the amount of redundant information needed for error recovery in the parser, leading to poorer error messages and reducing the quality of interactive IDE feedback. I know this because I was working in the IDE when martin made the decision. Maybe it was the right decision, but there were definitely costs!

There is a very good reason they will never eliminate semi colons from C#, the visual studio team would never let them...C# is developed in a completely different style from Scala.

I'm sure you are right: scala today is probably a much more simple language with great IDE support...7 years ago, it was a bunch of advanced features and building a decent IDE for it was a struggle.

Re: Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

#620

Post by frowaway001 »

Vektorweg wrote: post #291
brodo wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Scala, there are just too many ways to do things. It's optimized for flexibility and easy writability. C# on the other hand may be a little more verbose, but at least everyone can read everyone elses code.

Actually, the vast amount of features in C# isn't improving readability. But MS can't just throw out the bad half of features, which makes C# practically unimprovable. Scala has a similar problem.

> But MS can't just throw out the bad half of features, which makes C# practically unimprovable. Scala has a similar problem.

How? Scala has been throwing out bad features in pretty much every single release for the last 5 years.

It's nothing breathtaking, it just gets done, people are happier and the language gets better.

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