Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Wed 21st Jan 2004 07:56 UTC
Unix was originally all about not being... Multics. If Mono is to follow a similar nomenclature (just for the kicks), we have to talk about Mono's upcoming 'monopolization' and 'monarchy' in the next generation of the Unix programming land. Your see, if everything goes well, in 2 to 3 years most new Gnome user/desktop applications will be written --hopefully-- in Mono and C#. Update: Miguel deIcaza replies.
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I have been programming in .Net on windows for approx 2 years now, and I have to say it is the perfect combination of powerful codewriting and RAD.
I've had Mono on linux for about 6 months now, and I have to say I am very impressed by all the hard work and what it has brought to the linux development table. I can understand why some may fear its integration into Gnome, but I strongly believe the tighter the better. Look at what Longhorn is offering - a fully fledged .Net based OS. As an MSDN subscriber I've had chance to work with some of the prerelease APIs and it is obvious Windows developing will be considerably easier than the current Win32 when Longhorn finally hits retail channels.
True, I would love to see pure .NET/C#/Managed-C++ applications, however, the reality is that it won't happen. It took atleast 5 years to get only a handful of companies from win16 to win32, I fear how long it will take these same companies to move from one programming paradigm to another.
As for GNOME, the issue isn't the fact that the technology is developed by Microsoft but the fact that there are so many parts that have been patented and thus make OSS developers nervious that if they're too successful Microsoft may strike back at the OSS community.
If these patents didn't exist and Microsoft was just a big happy company who didn't do any wrong, the whole GNOME community would jump into bed with mono without any quarms, but the fact is, when you take into account the above information, yes, one has to be cautious.
From a mono perspective, it is also fantastic seeing command-line based apps developed for Windows compiling and running on my Linux machine. Of further interest, some of the more basic applications like simple data migration tools actually seem to perform slightly better than on .Net/Windows.
Well, considering that Mono is not feature complete and most of the attention is being paid of completion, I would wait a few years before making a full gone conclusion.
One the thing I do hope is that Mono doesn't become Linux centric but rather *BSD/*NIX centric thus allowing to run on Linux, *BSD, Solaris, HP-UX etc etc.
With Mono, GTK# and Glade I believe Gnome will have a development platform comparable to Longhorns APIs in the future. If Sun don't want something as easy to use and powerful as this then so be it, they can continue their own version of Gnome with Java and the questionable GTK theme. With the X replacements/augmentations currently in the works, linux will surely have an offering on a par with Longhorn for developers, it remains to be seen what the desktop users will choose.
SUN does want something that is easy to develop and use hence the reason they're developing RAVE which will appear in the JDS Developer Workstation Edition which will ship IIRC, mid way through this year to co-incide with the second JDS release.
Btw, having programmed using Java, it is a piece of piddle. Compared to VB - a butcher proceedural/OO language, Java is a walk the park.