On Monday 19 July 2010 08:17 AM, openbala wrote:
Isn't that how most of the opensource projects begin? (I might be on a limbo here, but I agree that there are first class ideas in oss projects also)
It might have been the case before, but increasingly, at least in the area that I'm involved in (web development) the rate of innovation in the open source projects (especially web servers/frameworks) is really out-stripping the proprietary variants. I'm optimistic enough to hope that it will spread to other parts of the technology ecosystem. What I'm trying to say is, if somebody starts tries to start something like Mono now, they will be rightly looked at as behind the times. There's simply no need for that kind of paranoia now. Innovation and FOSS go together very well, and it's been proven plenty of times now.
I'm not an authority on deciding which technology to use in business. Probably, if I have my own company I may not choose the .Net stack. My views were only from a developer's perspective of some of the features given by a language. Like a kid standing in front of a candy shop. Why should being a opensource developer stop one from learning the stack, after all we are developers in first place.
Of course you're free to choose what you want to learn. But if you want it to grow into something of a career, even as a developer you have to be careful what you choose. I'm just pointing out that .Net might have a lot of goodies you are excited about, but perhaps your time is better spent looking at alternatives in the FOSS world where the pace of innovation is far more rapid, and longevity of your skillsets depends solely on the language's merits and adoption, not on a company's ability to control markets, which might or might not be sustainable in the long run.
With people like Eric Meijer and Don Syme in the team - .Net stack has got some remarkable features such as LINQ, lambda expressions, covariants& contravariants, type inference which the Java world is still dreaming out. Porting F# as a first class language on .net platform is also a boost to the functional programming community. My thoughts were only to bring these features to Linux.
Sounds like fun - but are you absolutely sure that there are no FOSS alternatives available that lets you play with those language features? There are plenty of functional languages that are implementing cutting edge PL research (I'm a bit of a PL geek myself, and I still remember the long rants and vain attempts of Jon Harrop trying to convince comp.lang.lisp audience how F# is better than Common Lisp, but I doubt if he won any real converts, except ending up alienating the whole of c.l.l being termed a troll :). I do remember hearing that Qi has some of those features, but you have to do your own research in that aspect. All I'm trying to point out is, your time is probably more worthwhile and might avoid nasty surprises down the road if you stay clear of languages promoted by companies with a history as that of Microsoft.
Apple is using 3.3.1 selectively. There are still a lot of cross-compiled code in app store that was built using mono and other similar tools. But I agree with you on this that we can't develop applications on monotouch and just pray that Apple will somehow make it available in app store.
The whole point of 3.3.1 is to be able to use it selectively, I think :). Granted that I lost most of my respect for Apple for quite some time, but you only have to read some of the horror stories of indie developers who have invested so much time and money into writing an iPhone app, only to be yanked out of App Store because it's either conflicts with Apple's world-view or more narrowly, their revenue stream. Do you really want to be part of that kind of paranoid environment where so much rides on whether or not Apple (or some other 3rd party) thinks highly of your app? Finally, as a developer, that's a call you have to make. I'm guessing for most of us in this forum, taking permission from the likes of Apple for doing what we love to do is simply not an option :)
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