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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

#291

Post by Vektorweg »

brodo wrote: post #235
eloisant wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C# as a language is better than Java, but not as good as Scala.

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.

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

#293

Post by mahouse »

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…

Netscape killed itself.

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

#294

Post by lawl »

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.

The article seemed to mostly focus on the server side of things, but I'm not really sure if they can pull many devs over to writing application servers on .net. It will be hard competing against Java there.

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

#295

Post by colbyh »

Microsoft people correct me if I'm wrong - but this feels like a decision Ballmer never would have let pass?

This feels huge to me as someone that has always been on *nix variants but that has been told the .Net environment is amazing as long as you're willing to pay/work on Windows. I still probably won't switch over to C# or F# any time soon but it's good to know I could actually work on a WinMo app if needed.

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

#296

Post by jacquesm »

Someone1234 wrote: post #283
jacquesm wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm curious whether, with the fullness of technological hindsight, you still deplore what they did to Netscape. Absolutely. I dislike tied sales, I dislike having to buy a Microsoft operating system with my hardware just as much as I dislike getting IE (or chrome or any other browser) forcefully rammed down my throat when I buy an operating system. I'm pretty sure you can guess what browser I'm using to type this c…

> Does it? Yes. You say you want choice, but if you didn't have a browser how would you download the browser of your choice? Osmosis? Or, more importantly how would your average user download their browser? Every OS since then (OSS or not) has shipped with a browser and has made it the default for any API rendering that needs to occur (e.g. Ubuntu, Android, OS X, Windows, iOS, Firefox OS, etc). Netscape's business mo…

FTP? Wget? Xmodem? Does it even matter? It's not as if downloading a piece of software without a browser is an impossibility. About 99% of the software on the machine I write this on has been downloaded using something called a package manager and the boot CD that started the process was downloaded as a torrent. No browser required.

> Netscape's business model would have held the internet back significantly. If Microsoft was forced to provide IE on a CD and sell that CD for $40 then frankly it could have held the internet back at least five years.

You can't make statements like that. This is the reality we live in, there is no undo/redo/replay so we only have data about this reality. What would or could have happened if things had not gone the way they did is immaterial, for all you know we'd have moved faster rather than slower. We just do not know. What we do know is that Microsoft engaged in illegal anti-competitive behavior, and that they continued this for quite a while after they were already convicted using their lobbying power to get-out-of-jail free.

People were downloading files long before browsers were commonplace.

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

#297

Post by jbooth »

eranation wrote: post #251
eloisant wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C# as a language is better than Java, but not as good as Scala.

I don't know why you are being down voted. Erik Meijer, a huge .NET contributor who worked at Microsoft (on C# among other things), and was behind the reactive .NET extensions (and also a big Haskell contributor) - he was saying exactly the same thing about Scala vs C# - http://www.infoq.com/presentations/covariance-contravariance... I can also testify as someone who uses Scala on a day to day basis and used C# at wo…

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 write null-checks or having to understand category theory to read my code, I'll take the null-checks.

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

#298

Post by Locke1689 »

lmm wrote: post #271
nathas wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain why you think so?

Most of the selling points on scala-lang.org still apply over C# - type inference, pattern matching, case classes (C# makes these less bad than Java, but the field/property distinction can still bite you), an inheritance model that supports the good parts of multiple inheritance without the problems, covariance/contravariance, for/yield syntax that's generic and user-controlled, higher-kinded types. It takes a while…

So I guess the pitch is: imagine C# async/await could be "just a library", and other contexts that you wanted to handle similarly could also be a library, and the resulting functions are first-class citizens in the type system (no awkward choices of whether a particular function is async or not, you can handle that generically).

That's true in F# -- async is just a library in a computation expression.

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

#299

Post by api »

Wow. The new Microsoft indeed.

If there are any MS people in this thread: I would pay for Visual Studio for Mac and Linux if I could also use its GUI designers on those platforms. If I could write a GUI front-end in C# and design it with VS and ship it for Windows, Mac, Linux, and possibly others, then I'd definitely pay money for that.

Right now we've got Qt, Java, and possibly HTML5+node-webkit for that, and none of those are anywhere near as good as MS's GUI tooling and IDE.

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

#300

Post by aerique »

jpgvm wrote: post #61

I'm a hardcore *nix guy but boy do I love me some C#. Up until now it's been the best language I have worked with but the worst platform due to it's lack of 'nice things' that we just expect from languages/ecosystems these days. Where 'nice things' is defined as being open-source, having open-source ecosystem of developer tools etc. This isn't so much the beginning (as good stuff has been happening for a couple of ye…

What languages have you got experience with that you feel C# is the best language you have worked with?

And what makes it such a good language for you?

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