[ale] [OT] Interesting Take on MS Programming Tools

[attriel]

> Call him on it.  I'd ask him to provide examples of the limitations of
> UNIX.  He's probably not got a clue about open source UNIX.
>
>> "It allows you to program in any language, and use your code in any
>> other language, unlike Unix which is very limited and restrictive."

Well, from what was quoted at least, it doesn't sound like he's talking
about MS code bing more portable or more powerful.  Just that .NET allows
you to connect VB & C++ code cleanly and transparently via the whole .NET
VM thing.

OK, the "unlike Unix which is very limited and restrictive" is just weird,
since it's not like VS did this a year ago, either.  OTOH, parrot
(underlying perl6) is starting to take on features of a .NET VM thing, in
that it has it's own complete internal/intermediate language, is being
structured for the "write-once run-anywhere" like the JVM (if you have the
VM you can run the bytecode), and has people messing with C, Basic (GW &
Tru), Pascal and Java compilers already, and some OS .NET folks looking at
it as an alternative target for their compilers (didn't 100% follow that
conversation, i'm kinda behind on my mail and skimming those lists ...)

So, yeah, MS lets you translate your VB into C++ code (I think it enabled
the decomposition back to code, albeit decomposition will never be GOOD
code, perse) and use them transparently now, but unix isn't "old and
backwards" just b/c it doesn't have this new thing (and i realize that the
concept of link libraries to call lib functions from another language has
existed before, but I don't recall any common-intermediate platform thing
before .NET; java's VM was shocking enough for most people :)

Honestly, having looked at c# i actually kindof like it, and .NET sounds
good.  My big problem, as someone else pointed out, is just the company
that did it ;)  Well, more to the point, I can't afford the public
pricetag on VS :/

--attriel


_______________________________________________
Ale mailing list
Ale at ale.org
http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale