Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

news.microsoft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

661–670 of 937 posts

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

#661

Post by spion »

spion wrote: post #565
yarou wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, understanding I/O in Haskell takes quite a bit of mental gymnastics. :) The I/O monad modifies the Universe that contains the set of all functions that comprise your program (if I even understand the concept correctly).

The IO monad is just an action. Its a cons pair with a left and a right half. In an imperative language you could model the left half with a closure that takes no arguments, does I/O and produces a value. The right half is usually empty, except when you use the `>>=` operator (or flatMap) on an existing action, e.g. let c = a >>= f That operator chains the function `f` can take the value produced by the first IO acti…

or these PureScript examples https://gist.github.com/spion/982350f4b3d3464b1870 using the Canvas monad to pre-create a scene and then render it; the DOM monad to construct DOM elements.

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

#662

Post by dragonwriter »

jakevn wrote: post #659
dragonwriter wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 af…

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

Right. Scala has C#-style default parameters as well, implicit parameters are a different (though very loosely related) thing.

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

#663

Post by plq »

I see so much emotion in this thread. Yes, I was there to witness what M$FT (ha! take that Mr. Gates!) did around the dawn of this millenium as well, but we had all felt that the times they were a-changin' when Slashdot retired the Bill-the-evil-Borg image already. It's just Microsoft refused to adapt until now, which e.g. made them miss The Mobile in its entirety.

So, Microsoft is finally adapting. But what are they actually doing? Why did Microsoft finally decided to make .Net cross-platform? What's in it for them?

Look at what's in this shiny new package: They've open-sourced just the core runtime. They are not open-sourcing Visual Studio. Or WPF. Or SQL Server. Or Active Directory. Or Office.

There's one thing the Linux ecosystem is pretty good at: Scaling, both up and down. There are technical reasons for that, but none could possibly be an issue for a software powerhouse the size of Microsoft. There are also commercial reasons for that, most important being: You just can't beat free.

So that's what Microsoft is finally moving against -- Dear startup founder who is afraid that licensing costs will eat him/her alive while his/her "Growth Hacking" strategy is working, dear embedded programmer whose tiny IoT device that just can't cope with the whole Windows mumbo-jumbo, welcome to the Microsoft platform -- You can now safely run your C# on these free platforms as well.

So, Microsoft is finally back in the game. They even seem to be playing nice. But the question in everyone's mind is: For how long?

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

#664

Post by seanmcdirmid »

plq wrote: post #663

I see so much emotion in this thread. Yes, I was there to witness what M$FT (ha! take that Mr. Gates!) did around the dawn of this millenium as well, but we had all felt that the times they were a-changin' when Slashdot retired the Bill-the-evil-Borg image already. It's just Microsoft refused to adapt until now, which e.g. made them miss The Mobile in its entirety. So, Microsoft is finally adapting. But what are they…

> So, Microsoft is finally back in the game. They even seem to be playing nice. But the question in everyone's mind is: For how long?

I think a better question might be: what next? (Disclaimer: optimistic MS employee)

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

#665

Post by megablast »

chiph wrote: post #552
tzs wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - Netscape If you are referring to Microsoft's bundling of IE, that did not kill Netscape. It just buried the rotting corpse. Before IE was bundled with Windows, it was sold in stores as a boxed product, right next to Netscape's boxed product. Going head to head in retail software stores (Egghead, CompUSA), IE massively outsold Netscape. This is what killed Netscape. The reason IE outsold Netscape at retail was sim…

All those "Best on IE" and "Best viewed on Netscape" image buttons from back in the day... I thought I had forgotten about them, but you had to drag them up from the depths... ;)

> I thought I had forgotten about them

You thought you had forgotten about something? How does that work.

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

#666

Post by seanmcdirmid »

jakevn wrote: post #638
hokkos wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give me examples of implicits in C# ? I am unable to see a parallel.

using System; public class Program { public class Person { private string _name; private int _age; public Person(string name, int age) { _name = name; _age = age; } public static implicit operator int(Person p) { return 42; } } public static void Main() { var person = new Person("Jim", 51); var number = 100; AdditionPrinter(person, number); // Prints 142 } public static void AdditionPrinter(int a, int b) { Console.Wr…

Also consider extension methods, which serve some of the same purpose as implicits in Scala.

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

#667

Post by orf »

useerup wrote: post #527
jpgvm wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generics, Partial Classes, awesome Reflection API, Lambda syntax, LINQ, C/C++ compatibility, async/await, concurrency primitives, etc. I have worked with prettier languages, for instance I have picked up Haskell recently, I have also worked with faster languages, C was my forte for many years and I have worked with languages in the GSD category like Ruby and Python. C# is appealing not because of some feature that it…

async/await is HUGE. It opens an almost frictionless asynchronous pathway from your code all the way down to asynchronous capabilities of the underlying platform. Which was always the problem with leveraging async/overlapped IO: It was too complex and it turned your application logic inside-out because everything had to be performed in callbacks. async/await takes that on directly: You get everything executed in call…

FYI Python has had an await equivalent for a looong time through the Twisted networking library and now asyncio. It has the same semantics, but you use the yield keyword instead of await.

Also as of recently there is a standard library event loop package, and as far as I know Twisted was the defacto event loop on 2.x for most types of work.

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

#669

Post by Amezarak »

jacquesm wrote: post #153
FlyingSnake wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'll never switch back to MS for what they've done in the past I'm not sure what they've done to receive such hatred. They are just a technology company and are trying to sell the product.

> I'm not sure what they've done to receive such hatred. Hatred? I simply decide not to buy into a certain company's products and services because I recall some misdeeds from the past and that's equal to hatred? As for what they have done, I thought Microsofts history was chronicled enough that it doesn't need repetition, especially not on a website for 'hackers'. But if you need pointers, you can go visit groklaw.ne…

I don't understand this attitude. Microsoft's behavior (especially recently) is not out of line with the other tech giants. They are for the most part ethically indistinguishable - so whose products and services can I buy into? Who do you recommend?
Post reply on HN