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Miguel de Icaza defends Mono

Posted by VISITOR on · 28 comments
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Miguel de Icaza defends Mono and talks about its future relationship with the Gnome desktop, in the latest LugRadio. [LXer editor note: the interview is excellent, if you can survive the first few minutes of teenage-style laughter at the beginning.]

Miguel de Icaza defends Mono and talks about its future relationship with the Gnome desktop, in the latest LugRadio.

The leader of the open source implementation of .NET says no one is forced to use Mono but he hopes it will make life easier for open source developers.

LugRadio (usual swearing warning applies).

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Comments (28)

8 earlier comments in the full thread.

If I was ever a monkey I would be a Bonobo too :)

@dino

despair not - for Mono is far from ready!

you still can't get one single Windows.Form GUI to run on Linux under Mono. the only thing that works on Mono are CLI apps and ASP.NET (up to a point some libraries are still missing like SqlServer which most MS apps will have) still they are developing as fast as poss the Windows.Forms port now using Cairo.

.NET webapps are dreadfully slow - just have a look at orkut to get the idea. great for tiny shops - disaster for big enterprises (unless you have farms and farms of servers at your disposal) webforms are eeky - the controls are non-compliant, non-accessible, non-compatible with many browsers/platforms.

again .NET appeals only for the MS / Java / .NET developer not the Linux veteran. and hence the controversial nature oh and it sprung from MS .. so more antagonism from many.

C# is kinda cute but Eiffel is much prettier (only problem is - Eiffel doesn't work under .NET like it's supposed to)

@Tuxchic

You can write apps with QT# as well as GTK# apparently you can get things up and running pretty fast. If you manage to install all those dreaded libraries. I gave up trying.

Dinotrac: show them Ruby. Yes, really. (-:
Ruby?

But it took me so long to go from perl to python, that I don't think I'll live long enough to get that far in the alphabet...

Oh - wait - there is all that xml stuff. Does that mean I have to start over? Could I at least skip ahead to erlang?
erlang? What about cobol?
COBOL?

N-O-O-O-O!!!!!!!

It's a funny thing, though. I had to learn COBOL as a right of passage when I joined the still Ross Perot-led EDS. I was working in the Systems software group, doing performance/capacity planning measurement and reporting. The languages I used were a very strange amalgam of very high level (SAS) and low (System 370 assembly language). However, all newbies were expected to go through the Systems Engineer Development Program, which, at the time I took it, was all COBOL. Seven days a week, all day, all night, all COBOL.

I still break out in sweats.

MESMERIC: there is no huge learning curve to picking up Python. It's a very straightforward language compared to (say) Java or C++.

Ruby is in a way not as simple to pick up. It is so totally, almost painstakingly orthogonal that after using other languages one tends to come to Ruby and repeat the other lanugages' mistakes because you can.

Dinotrac, are you listening for this next bit? Ruby is fun. Once you get the hang of it, it's terribly easy and terribly powerful. Once you stop peering around the corner looking for the next unexpected restriction (which is never there), the epiphany arrives and everything just unsticks and flows.

It's kind of like leaving BorgLand for a real OS - once you stop saving every five minutes lest the machine go down in flames, taking your work with it; once you stop flinching when you click on a new link, the whole experience becomes enjoyable. It's like discovering computers all over again.

Hmm. Looking back on this, it all sounds terribly right-brained for a bloke. Perhaps a more concrete analogy?

It's like going from The GIMP 2.0 to The GIMP 2.2; very few of the differences are revolutionary but an awful lot of small, almost unnoticeable annoyances have been fixed. Controls are right where you need them rather than half a screen and three levels of menus away. Things that once required three steps and a script are now one built-in click. All of the little doohickeys have a preview window so you can experiment with an effect "live" - in real time - instead of "try, wait forever, wrong, undo, iterate". In terms of workflow the nett effect of the zillion small improvements is like going from sandpaper to teflon.
AnonymousCoward, I could never have explained it better than you. I tried Perl and Python, and couldn't write a single line of code. I could read code, but when trying to write some it was never right, and I couldn't get why. And it was anything *but* fun.

And then I discovered Ruby, and everything fell into place! The language behaves *exactly* like I want it, and in the rare occurrence when it doesn't, the reason why is usually understandable and even *fun*! :) And now I have plenty of Ruby scripts around, doing plenty of little, or not little, things, and they just work!

Ruby just feels like it fits neatly in my brains :) . I didn't have to adapt to Ruby, it looks more like the language adapts to *me*. And for me, that's the minimum I ask for my tools :) .
Hmmmm.......

Sounds like I may have to give Ruby a look. Why not have yet another language to screw me up? It's bad enough that xslt slips into my perl slips into my python slips into my C slips into my SQL .... well, you get the idea.

What could be more fun than tripping over something that works in a way completely different from the things I can convince people to pay me for?

;0)

While I'm at it, sounds like I need to upgrade from Gimp 2.0...



"While I'm at it, sounds like I need to upgrade from Gimp 2.0..."

Without a doubt -- your fake photo edits of me were obvious to anyone with an untrained eye.

Paulie, Paulie, Paulie:

Not everyone can go to the U of Eye.
I hate Steve Jobs more than Bill Gates. Yet I feel powerless. Hatred churns my stomach and chars my soul :(
Oh, Dino, you want to get paid for writing in Ruby? In that case you probably want to take a dekko at Ruby on Rails: http://www.rubyonrails.org/

"Rails is a full-stack, open-source web framework in Ruby for writing real-world applications with joy and less code than most frameworks spend doing XML sit-ups" and yes, they are serious. (-:

I'm planning to call my first major Rails app "Out Of Town" so I can claim, "I've written Out Of Town on Rails". (-:
does any of you do GUI with RUBY?
MESMERIC: I've dabbled with fxruby (FOX toolkit), but nothing serious. I must say though that I've had more fun with that way of GUI making than with GUI making with other languages. Ruby's closures make it feel very natural to connect code to events. I haven't tried any other GUI framework with Ruby, so I don't know how it fares with GT or QT...

I know there are a few IDEs around that can make Ruby code. I haven't tried them though. Once again, I've only dabbled with GUI and Ruby, so I had no problem coding everything myself.
ok downloading.. am looking for an entry point for RAD/GUI programming in Linux maybe fxruby is all I need? I will try that

thanks loads
I'm planning to call my first major Rails app "Out Of Town" so I can claim, "I've written Out Of Town on Rails". (-:

Now I know why you stay anonymous!
MESMERIC: Well, fxruby is just a Ruby module. It's easy to program a GUI using it, but I doubt you can call that RAD/GUI programming ;) . As for GUI builders, there are a few out there, but most are in early stages of development. I can think of foxGUIb, Locana, specRuby... (http://raa.ruby-lang.org/cat.rhtml?category_major=Applicatio...). There is somewhere a commercial GUI builder but I can't remember where. But those are already good entry points for RAD/GUI programming in Ruby. It is just unfortunate that they are so early in their development yet...
MESMERIC: KDevelop does Ruby (Ruby/Qt especially).

Tsela: wxRuby is also good. and Ruby/SDL for games and embedded stuff (there are a few Ruby libraries which extend that, too, like specific coverage for OpenGL).
AnonymousCoward: Last time I had checked it, wxRuby was extremely limited. Maybe they advanced a bit since I checked :) . I know about the rest, I just never have had a reason to try it :) . As for KDevelop, I had looked at it but never saw that it could do Ruby. I'll have to take a look at it again...

Ruby is great, but its status of "New Kid on the Block" in Western countries can make it difficult to find mature applications and libraries (not to mention documentation). This gap is quickly being filled, but that began late enough that we are still in the process.
ever one heard of Rubyx ? its a distro that uses Ruby as its installer and other things. I almost downloaded it once. I am sure the Ruby-fans know about it - but if you don't check it out http://www.rubyx.org

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