Microsoft takes .NET open source and cross-platform

Post by daveloyall » Thu, Nov 13, 2014, 5:46 PM UTC

throwawaykf05 wrote: post #732

daveloyall wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@com2kid Microsoft defined what computers are capable of. Let me clarify: most people heard Microsoft's version of reality first--and they were amazed! We all were. Computers have changed life for all of us. But computers aren't what they could have been... Microsoft's version of computers is a pale and sickly thing, it's engineered for--that is, optimized for--profit rather than productivity. Some people use compute…

> Microsoft's version of computers is a pale and sickly thing, it's engineered for--that is, optimized for--profit rather than productivity. I think you have it backwards. It's the new vision of computers (walled gardens, all the interesting logic hidden away in data centers, content consumption appliances instead of real computers) that is pale and sickly. > How many more lives might have been saved over the past co…

Post by com2kid » Thu, Nov 13, 2014, 6:19 PM UTC

72deluxe wrote: post #808

com2kid wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now I love C#, but in defense of the above poster, standard library code is often pretty gnarly stuff. C++ is the poster child for this. No one argues that C++ is a bad language just because the standard library is full of magic.

I find the STL great! Sure, some compiler template messages can be tricky to understand but STL doesn't detract from C++ - you don't have to use the STL (but you're probably losing out if you don't use it and roll all those containers and algorithms yourself)

Post by frowaway001 » Thu, Nov 13, 2014, 6:37 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #876

frowaway001 wrote: post #861

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you still haven't explained how Scala has a similar problem.

I am not the OP. Just commenting on this > Scala has been throwing out bad features in pretty much every single release for the last 5 years. You cannot throw out features in a language with the community size C# has, otherwise you just get another Python 3.0.

  a) Microsoft is in an excellent position to make such 
     changes, unlike Python, because Microsoft shops will 
     largely do whatever Microsoft tells them.

     Just have a look at how often they have incompatibly 
     changed the standard library used by C#.

  b) Not every language has to botch the transition as badly
     as Python designers did.

Post by jaked89 » Thu, Nov 13, 2014, 8:13 PM UTC

perlgeek wrote: post #357

This is huge. A few months ago, we decided to write a big new software component at $work, basically a service layer that is going to accumulate lots of business logic. We discussed several programming languages, and thought that a statically typed language might be a good fit (we mostly did perl and python so far). C# was dismissed pretty quickly, because .Net was closed source, and Mono had the reputation of being…

Post by perlgeek » Thu, Nov 13, 2014, 9:11 PM UTC

jaked89 wrote: post #887

perlgeek wrote: post #357

This is huge. A few months ago, we decided to write a big new software component at $work, basically a service layer that is going to accumulate lots of business logic. We discussed several programming languages, and thought that a statically typed language might be a good fit (we mostly did perl and python so far). C# was dismissed pretty quickly, because .Net was closed source, and Mono had the reputation of being…

What ever you were designing, it's almost certain that a more expensive, and mission critical system than yours was already built with C#. Objecting to a major language as C# because it's "closed-source" seems irrational to me. Why does it matter if it's open or closed-source? It's not like you can realistically invest time to dig in the source code and modify it, in the rare case that you found a problem. C# had hug…