Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform • Hacker News Board

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

#651

Post by gedrap » Wed, Nov 12, 2014, 11:23 PM UTC

MichaelGG wrote: post #621

alkonaut wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, Mono was at least realistic in the last year(s), but it was always a bit of a guessing game whether something was going to work or not. Having an official linux/mac os ASP.NET will be huge, even if the functinoal difference is minor compared to Mono. Just knowing it will work tomorrow , and after the next major release is huge. Yesterday I would rather have chosen Node.js than a .NET solution for a small servic…

Node's like, one of the worst choices, due to the idiotic package manager. They ship essentially every function call as a separate package. It's actually a thing to take a dependency on "sha1" and literally pull in a package just for that one bit. Using Node/Grunt/Bower to build a straightforward run end site (just to compile static outputs) required npm installing over 13 thousand files. Now imagine on a build serve…

And then add sometimes not properly defined version dependencies (or developers abusing version numbers a bit) and you have a dependency hell when running npm update -g will almost definitely break something.

I love yeoman, great scaffolding tool, but it depends on so many packages that sometimes it simply doesn't work because some package it depends on did something silly. So once you have a working set up, don't update it if you absolutely must.

That shouldn't be the case in 2014.

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

#652

Post by sytelus » Wed, Nov 12, 2014, 11:32 PM UTC

I seriously hope this pushes out Java closer to graveyard of forgotten languages. Java had been rotting for a long time without significant progress compared to modern languages including C#. It's only advantage had been that it was cross platform. Now it's owned by lawyers-driven Oracle which is as worse as things can get. Also I really want to stop worry about having my mom install crapware like Ask toolbar and say No to Update Java every single day.

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

#653

Post by Dewie » Wed, Nov 12, 2014, 11:36 PM UTC

imanaccount247 wrote: post #393

jbooth wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because, A), it was an uncalled-for digression into language wars, and B), now that we're here anyways, a lot of us think the majority of features in scala and Haskell for that matter are fundamentally misguided. My goal is not to write elegant code, but to write the least complex code with the lowest cognitive overhead. TCO, 10x the man-hours in maintenance and all that. If the choice is between having to w…

How can you think they are "fundamentally misguided" if you don't even know what they are? The category theory strawman is the absolute laziest, most absurd piece of FUD you could possibly resort to. It is even worse than the old "perl is bad because I don't want to read line noise" nonsense, at least that had some loose tie to reality.

"""YOU NEED TO LEARN ABOUT MONADS JUST TO WRITE 'HELLO WORLD', LIKE WHAT IS UP WITH THAT."""

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

#654

Post by vcjohnson » Wed, Nov 12, 2014, 11:40 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #147

OWaz wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

- Stacker - Netscape - SCO And many others besides. Companies have reputations just like people do (that's why we call them 'incorporated') and just like you can lose your trust in a person you can lose your trust in a corporation. This is not about Microsoft just doing 'stupid stuff sometimes' it is about institutionalized criminal behavior sanctioned at the highest level of one of the largest software companies in…

While I can tolerate most of your post, Hanselman's blog is not silly. Well it is, but not in the disparaging way you mean.

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

#655

Post by sytelus » Wed, Nov 12, 2014, 11:42 PM UTC

Here's Github repo: https://github.com/dotnet. Wow, these things are being released under MIT licence - who would have thought .Net would be more "free-er" than Java?

In other news:

* Visual Studio 2015 and ASP.NET 5 will support gulp, grunt, bower and npm for front end developers.

* OmniSharp is a family of Open Source projects, each with one goal - To enable great .NET development in YOUR editor of choice - http://www.omnisharp.net/.

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

#656

Post by _dps » Wed, Nov 12, 2014, 11:43 PM UTC

SamReidHughes wrote: post #641

jacquesm wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Missed opportunity to explain why those are 'fundamentally misguided'.

GP didn't mention specifically which features were misguided, making a response require a disproportionate amount of effort compared to what he's put in. And he's talking complete nonsense about "category theory," which is just ridiculous so it's not like he's close to worthy of some effort-post.

In my experience the "category theory" claim is imprecise but not unfounded. Without fairly serious abstract understanding of monads, functors, and applicatives (at a bare minimum), it is not possible to write Haskell code profitably. By that I mean that without such knowledge you should have just written something else.

To make Haskell a serious advantage and not just a minor benefit (compared to, say, SML), you probably also need to understand kinds. Let's bear in mind that the vast majority of practicing programmers can't reasonably define an algebraic data type, and that it's not their fault, because the ROI for learning such things is often negative.

I do think there is a reactionary "don't-wanna-learn anything" vibe against Haskell among certain groups. But I think we should be clear that, to get the power that Haskell promises, you do need to learn many new things. Those things, while not exactly category theory in a narrow sense, are closer to category theory than they are to conventional programming knowledge.

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

#657

Post by anonyfox » Wed, Nov 12, 2014, 11:46 PM UTC

Great. Now release visual studio "native" for OS X and I'd have a look at it. Having to run an emulated windows just to fiddle around in a fairly heavyweight IDE sucks.

As nice as C#/F# is, the real fun comes from the powerful IDE. And I just don't do windows anymore, except for occasional gaming (and this only until I finally buy the new retina iMac and throw the last PC at home away).

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

#658

Post by jacquesm » Wed, Nov 12, 2014, 11:47 PM UTC

m_mueller wrote: post #649

jacquesm wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure you could go on all day but this thread is about microsoft. Apple's products are not welcome here because of their walled garden approach and Google has done far worse than making a faux-pas in the net neutrality debate. Agreed on the buying up innovative start-ups and then killing them off, that's really bad and acqui-hires are hurting all start-ups.

Im curious, can you really get by without MS, Google and Apple? No LLVM based products for you? No Webkit? No CUPS? No V8? If you do use some of these projects, where's the difference from an Open Sourced .NET?

I get by without MS and Apple just fine (as I wrote elsewhere, I do still have an elderly Mac here that is sometimes used for compatibility testing but I don't even remember when I started it up last and it currently isn't even plugged in).

As for Google, that's the hard one to avoid. Adsense/Adwords is easy, youtube is hard (plenty of video content is only available on youtube), google search is still better than duckduckgo (and I'm really sorry about that, but I'm rooting for Gabriel to achieve parity some day even if that's an uphill battle), and I use Google docs for a few spreadsheets that I need to be able to access remotely.

My mail is on my own server, web stuff is classical 'LAMP', I don't use webkit, don't use V8 and I don't think I have an instance of CUPS here that is actually configured to do real work but it's possible that I'm missing a machine clever enough to auto-configue.

Other hardware is Dell, Synology (which has CUPS on board but it's not in use) and a variety of smaller fry.

It's really not all that hard to keep the big companies out of your life, one of these days I'll find a way to get rid of google completely. The most frequently used closed source product I have is Varicad (but they have a nasty little gotcha that I recently found out about so they're on the way out) and another is adobe acrobat reader (the linux version). Oh, and the Nvidia binary drivers for the graphics card in this box.

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

#659

Post by jakevn » Wed, Nov 12, 2014, 11:50 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #640

jakevn wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true. A talented C# dev will need to know co/contravariance as well as implicits considering they also exist in C#. In Scala, being familiar with these concepts is practically a necessity, though.

> A talented C# dev will need to know co/contravariance as well as implicits considering they also exist in C#. True for co/contravariance. For implicits, that depends on which implicits you are talking about. Scala has: * implicit conversion operators (these have existed in C# for some time, under the same name) * implicit parameters (C# doesn't have an analog to these that I can think of) * implicit classes (C# has…

> implicit parameters (C# doesn't have an analog to these that I can think of)

C# allows default values for parameters, but it's not quite the same.

Example of C# default value for parameter:

  static void Addition(int a, int b = 42)  
  {  
    Console.WriteLine(a + b);  
  }

  Addition(4); // Prints 46  
  Addition(4, 5); // Prints 9

In Scala, the default (implicit) value has more complex rules.

Like C#, implicit parameters must come after non-implicit parameters (if any).

Unlike C#, the implicit value does not need to be defined in the signature. Also unlike C#, if you provide the value for one implicit parameter, you must provide the value for all implicit parameters.

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

#660

Post by imanaccount247 » Thu, Nov 13, 2014, 12:00 AM UTC

_dps wrote: post #656

SamReidHughes wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GP didn't mention specifically which features were misguided, making a response require a disproportionate amount of effort compared to what he's put in. And he's talking complete nonsense about "category theory," which is just ridiculous so it's not like he's close to worthy of some effort-post.

In my experience the "category theory" claim is imprecise but not unfounded. Without fairly serious abstract understanding of monads, functors, and applicatives (at a bare minimum), it is not possible to write Haskell code profitably. By that I mean that without such knowledge you should have just written something else. To make Haskell a serious advantage and not just a minor benefit (compared to, say, SML), you pro…

Yes, it is completely unfounded. You do not need to know anything about category theory, or even what it is. All you need to know about Monad is its interface. If you can handle java, you can handle haskell. All you need to understand with kinds is "its how many arguments a type takes". And that isn't category theory in the first place. Anyone can define an ADT. That's one of the first things I taught our PHP team, nobody had any confusion or problems with it, it was a 2 minute thing. I have a hard time imagining how you could think:

    data Bool = True | False

is hard to learn or understand or woulf have a "negative ROI".