[Gllug] OT(ish): Advice

[Chris Ball]

>> On Thu, 12 Dec 2002 21:06:43, Bernard Peek <bap at shrdlu.com> said:

   > I think there are multiple reasons for it. With my marketing hat on
   > I see it as a brilliant way to develop a niche market. Introducing
   > a new language increases uncertainty. When things are uncertain
   > people tend to stay with the tried and tested, and in this case
   > that means Microsoft.

I think a less obvious reason that Microsoft are going with .NET is
purely for the type safety of the machine.  It's one of the most
strongly-typed machines I've ever seen, and this will make security
under it far easier to control than the random executable method Windows
uses now.

This makes it easier for Microsoft to work on purely the security of the
virtual machine implementation, and ignore the underlying OS security to
some extent; if your daemons run under .NET, Windows security becomes
more of a non-issue.

The strong typing has the disadvantage that we're unlikely to see to
language like Perl or Python hit the CLR.  The group who ported Python
to Java - Jython - tried to do the same with Python to .NET, and gave up
claiming resignation against the type system.  Many VB developers are
annoyed after Microsoft had to change VB so throughly to make it
targettable at .NET.

   > With my developer's hat on it's less obvious. My guess is that C#
   > fits between VB and C++. Microsoft wants people to move to
   > object-oriented languages and C# leads that way. I'd say that it's
   > probably intended as a high-level scripting language similar to
   > PERL and PHP.

I don't agree with this at all.  C# seems to me like 'Java done
properly', and certainly exhibits no traits of a scripting or high-level
language.  It's a surprisingly nice, expressive language to code in.

   > There's already an open-source C# compiler and for Windows
   > developers there's a free closed-source compiler available from
   > Microsoft.

I didn't realise that there was a free C# compiler for Windows; the only
one I was aware of was Visual C#, which comes with Visual Studio .NET
and costs about a thousand pounds.  Do you have any more details?

Cheers,

- Chris.
-- 
$a="printf.net";  Chris Ball | chris at void.$a | www.$a | finger: chris@$a


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