Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

Post by MrBra » Thu, Nov 13, 2014, 5:40 AM UTC

alanh wrote: post #483

tdicola wrote: post #156

Great news, but I think people need to realize this is really just Microsoft pledging to merge and support what Mono has already been doing. You won't magically be able to take a WPF app and run it on your Mac. You will however be able to write a server app or maybe simple command line tool that runs on Mac & Linux. It's great news to see Microsoft acknowledging and supporting Mono, but there isn't a magic switch tha…

Right. And that is a good thing. Java has shown us that no one really wants write-once-run-everywhere GUI software, as it never feels "right" or at-home on guest platforms

Post by Illniyar » Thu, Nov 13, 2014, 5:54 AM UTC

Post by simplemath » Thu, Nov 13, 2014, 6:00 AM UTC

ams6110 wrote: post #741

Pxtl wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft has been playing catch-up on developing that "nice things" like trying to build an open-source community. NuGet, open-sourcing the ASP.Net and EF stacks, etc. A long way to go, but they've recognized their big failing and are moving on it. MS makes some great technology and some terrible tech... but the problem is the terrible tech gets the same blessing as the great tech. An open-source community is the be…

I'm not so sure I believe that they're trying to do a "nice thing" out of the goodness of their hearts. They've held pretty tightly to .NET because in order to deploy anything developed in .NET you needed to buy Windows licenses. Recently that hasn't played out so well. Software developers look to minimize costs and overhead that doesn't contribute to their mission (e.g. licenses and license compliance). There's just…

Post by jbooth » Thu, Nov 13, 2014, 6:03 AM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #756

jbooth wrote: post #754

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Point being, I/O doesn't square with that concept. For some reason, every time I point this out, I'm accused of not appreciating the beauty of pure functions. I love pure functions. Maybe they're not appreciating the ugly reality of I/O?

> Point being, I/O doesn't square with that concept. Sure it does, and composes well under it.

Post by alkonaut » Thu, Nov 13, 2014, 6:21 AM UTC

marvy wrote: post #720

alkonaut wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? I just can't see why every language needs to gather cruft rather than evolve elegantly. Imho major versions of compilers should aim to NOT remain backwards compatible, so they can remove or change things in the syntax while they add things.

Imagine this. I'm using Cool-Lang version 2. Now Cool-Lang 3 comes out. It has lots of features that I want to use. If the new version is compatible with the old one, I download it and start using it. If not, I have to convert my whole codebase first. In practice, that means it may be many years before I can use version 3. Look at Python. In 3.0, they decided to clean up some stuff from 2.x. They even wrote a tool 2t…