Re: C#, .Net, and Mono

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From: Yossi Kreinin
Subject: Re: C#, .Net, and Mono
Date: 14:41 on 27 Dec 2006
> 
> I read it as an indictment of fadism and unthinking worship of
> "progress" which is really just "change" at the expense of reliability.
> Which is a pretty fair target.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean since I have a sarcasm overflow, so I'll emit 
a generic remark on the apparent subject. I think that the technology creation 
timestamp does not approximate it's quality. For example, C is not half as 
shitty a pile of toxic waste as C++, and Verilog is decent compared to the 
self-abusing SystemC (since the latter is built on top of C++), and Windows and 
Unix blow roughly with the same magnitude despite the age difference.

> 
> But you're right.  Managed environments may pay real dividends over
> time, even if Visual .Net shits the bed and forgets its dependency rules
> regularly when I use it.

Maturity is surely important. It will probably take time to craft enough diapers 
for .NET to look and smell mature.

However, if something is broken by design, diapers will not help. That's why 
C++, being compatible with C when it comes to the meaning of "dependency", 
"module", etc. (well, the lack of the meaning), is even worse than C when it 
comes to building a piece of hateful software written in it.

Rumors tell that Unices at the early 80's were as stable as Windows 3.11 at the 
early 90's. And it seems to me that Windows NT/2000 is as stable as a Linux 
machine today (I mean the subsystem causing it to be marginally useful, which 
includes the X server, and not the parts needed to keep the uptime incremented).

> 
> 
> Oh, wow, this is a whole arena of hate.  I can't really do it justice
> but I'll provide some tidbits.
> 

[true horror stories about .NET "portability" deleted]

> 
> This, my friends is the future of Enterprise Class development.
> 

I had the feeling it didn't really work that well. Thanks for the information, 
now I'm even more sure I won't touch it with a laser ray. Well, porting 
semantics designed on planet A to planet B rarely works. Consider Unix vs. NFS 
file deletion. And that's a pretty mature system.

In a lot of domains the OS installed on a box delivered to a customer is a part 
of the configuration just like the motherboard or the CPU instruction set, since 
the box is dedicated to some single shitty task (like screwing the customers of 
a bank). So the fact .NET only works (or does it?) on Windows is not a big deal. 
I don't work at these domains at the moment though, so .NET is not an option.

But there's too many strong programmers who are happy with .NET/Windows in order 
to completely dismiss .NET.

> 
> The definition lookup facilities of emacs, vi, whatever other
> time-honored tool, may be clumsy in some ways, but they certainly have
> existed longer than Visual Studio.

Sure. And pixmap editors predate Photoshop. The creation timestamp of a 
technology is correlated very weakly, if at all, with the quality.

> 
> These days they have all the _capabilities_ of something like
> intellisense, even if the usability of them is open for debate.
> 

They will never reach the level of something integrated with a compiler because 
the insane fucked-up grammar of C++ blows very intensively, and is furtherly 
enhanced with the C preprocessor. This is not the fault of emacs or vim (I use 
the latter for most of my programming), but it's a fact. I don't bother running 
stuff like ctags on C++ code.

There's stuff above here

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