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Ah, the Mono thing. I think of it a lot like I do Samba. I deeply wish that we did not need it, but I thank the gods that we have it. I'm glad it is there as a bridge for .net programmers and for applications compatibility, just as I am glad that Samba is there to allow us to have a strong file server offering for networks of Windows clients. But I strongly prefer not to see Mono used by existing members of our FOSS community for new projects. In particular, I strongly oppose its use for infrastructure.

Despite all the nonaggression assurances and C# standardization, I do not trust MS on this. Ecmascript is a standard, too, and MS's ubiquitous, but incompatible implementation of it is probably the single most significant thing tying my users to Crossover Office and IE, and sometimes even to Windows itself. (Mercifully, I, myself have no need for it for my daily work.)

I don't manage photographs or require post-it notes with advanced features. I find Beagle to be slow, buggy, and very prone to going off into infinite loops when I actually try to use it for anything useful. The Tracker guys started much later, programming in plain old 'C' and have a better product, even without the backing of a major corp like Novell. (This is where people usually remind me that Novell only allocated 1-3 guys to the project, and where I remind them back that the format conversion programs are third party and that the core of Beagle was handed to them on a silver platter in the form of Apache Lucene, which they had only to port from Java.)

Mono is also a bit of a memory hog. (Opinions vary as to the significance of that.)

Thus, based upon the available empirical evidence, I am unimpressed and completely unconvinced as to the programmer productivity advantages claimed by advocates of Mono. And given the open source availability of Java, I feel that it fits that niche better than Mono for FOSS apps.

I, personally, am a fan of Python, but recognize that Python is not right for every occasion. And that is where I feel Java should pick up. For system stuff, C and C++, of course.

One other thing. And I should say that I realize that this is a bit irrational of me, but it's also a very real feeling. Seeing executables listed in 'ps' and 'top' that end in ".exe" and having libraries on my machines that end in .dll makes me sick. I only include that information because I believe that, as human beings, we cannot avoid bias. The best that we can hope for is to be honest about those biases with ourselves and others. It adds a bit of useful context to my post.

Edited 2008-05-01 17:47 UTC

I figured you would stand somewhere around there ;-)



I have noticed that too when playing around with it in linux, and I really don't know why. Ever since 2.0, the only way to tell a .net app in windows is that uncaught exceptions give you a pretty distinctive error box. Other then that, when it comes to reponsiveness, memory use, etc there is no noticable difference. In linux however, you get the classic java experience of slow loading, bloated, and unresponsive apps.



The big problem with java (the reason that motivated miguel to do .net in the first place) is that the libraries are better archetected then the java ones, and that the platform actually is evolving. We have been getting stuff like lambdas (from python), and extension methods (basically like rubys open classes). Our generics implementation doesn't suck. We have the ability to do inferred typing (var c = "hi" becomes a string at compile time, var c = 1 becomes an int).

Unfortunately, java is driven by a consortium of companies, and it takes FOREVER to push anything through the process. Because of that, java has been stagnating for almost 20 years now, and the recent bursts of movement we have seen in the platform recently were driven because of what MS has been doing.

Anyways, I'm pretty biased in this (as you probably know, i'm not so much an MS zealot as I am a .net zealot ), but those are the reasonings for its existance.



At least you are man enough to admit it ;-)

We all have biases based on experience, and as someone who pushes alternative os adoption, you have alot of pain you can lay directly at microsofts feet. I would argue that at least 95% of that pain was completely unintentional (I know/have met a whole bunch of project managers from ms, and have yet to meet one that would deliberately do something to screw non ms projects), but that is pretty irrelevant for someone who has to deal with the consequences.

Believe it or not, I used to be a huge java/linux zealot. It was actually the linux community that drove me away from the OS. I have been using Linux since it came on floppies with a photocopied manual wrapped around them. I loved the tight-knit alpha-geek aspect of it, and the way that you really felt like a part of things, because at that time everyone who used it also hack on some aspect of the system. Nowadays, I find that the community has become overrun by ex windows "power users", who have alot of opinions about stuff they don't know anything about, and like to feel self-rightous about using linux, even though they contribute nothing.

Even though I am willing to admit there on a certain level, there is something just better about open source software in a whole bunch of market segments (platforms, operating systems, protocols, etc). Unfortunately, I suffer from the same feeling of illness you get when you see a .exe any time someone starts preaching to me about it.