Re: Ruby and .NET

Sean Middleditch wrote:

> Thus, hopefully, an Open implementation will be among the best.  ^,^

Absolutely.  I guess we only differ in opinion about what the value of that 
"best" is. :-)

> Well, I was thinking more like how ORBit would still be useful to GNOME
> even if it couldn't talk to another vendor's ORB.

Yes, again, good point.  My answer to that, then, is that most ORBs add a 
certain overhead which often isn't worth-while unless you plan on 
connecting with the outside world.  While I'm not positive I agree with 
them, the KDE team had a point in choosing an IPC mechanism closer to the 
metal (and avoiding the at-the-time heavily buzzword laden CORBA), in that 
CORBA added overhead and complexity that degraded the end result, rather 
than enhancing it.  I have to say that I don't see anybody really taking 
advantage of the fact that Gnome ships with a CORBA ORB.

>> change".  It isn't in their best interest, financially, to help Linux,
>> and MS is not known for their altruism.
> 
> Well, not only MS will be selling these services.  The idea behind .NET
> is that *anyone* can start a service.  WIth a functional implementation
> of .NET on Linux, Solaris, BSD, Mac, etc., you can bet a good number of
> services aren't going to be running on Windows servers.
....
> I don't see Microsoft forcing these services to shut down.

Perhaps.  Again, I just find it hard to believe that MS is encouraging 
anything that might increase /competition/. I fully expect that they'll 
encourage /innovation/.  .NET services which are popular, they'll roll out 
their own versions of which will, miraculously, work better and faster, and 
soon after that, the original service will begin suffering mysterious 
incompatibilities with the infrastructure.  The original company will have 
to use an increasing amount of resources to resolve these problems, being 
able to put less money into new development -- I'm not being terribly 
anti-MS here.  This is typical of their behavior in the past, and it is why 
they've been so successful.  Don't think it won't happen on .NET.  History 
shows that the playing field is not remotely even when MS controls the 
platform, and .NET is a platform.

> If .NET doesn't take off, or doesn't have the impact I expect it to,
> then yes, RUby probably will survive just fine as is, if perhaps near
> non-existant on MS platforms.

According to the Ruby Garden polls, the combined Windows users account for 
just over 34%, while Linux has 43%.  That's not bad saturation for Windows.

>> Hm.  Straw man argument.  Labeling my opinions FUD does not invalidate
>> them.  I don't claim to be a subject expert.
> 
> Aye, that's mostly what FUD is, isn't it?  "Badmouthing" something with
> no real technical merit.  ^,^

I define of FUD as misinformation disguised as fact.  Opinion is another 
matter.  If Bill Gates says he hates Linux because it is hard to use, 
that's opinion.  Paying a company to "produce" statistics that you define 
and then offering that information as proof -- that's FUD.

> what it can to make itself the leader of the technology - but opening
> the standards, letting every major player make their own implementation
> (both Sun and IBM have their own, for example, and Apple likely will
> too) and then breaking that will have one heck of a backlash.

You don't see the difference?  Microsoft has "opened" the standards to MS 
Word documents, too.  Anybody can implement their own MS Word format reader 
and writer.  StarOffice even does a pretty good job.

But not good enough.  *That's* the point.

I'm going to re-arranging the order in which I respond to the rest of the 
post.

> I don't see a Ruby# happening.. that would be fairly pointless.  Tying

Really?  They've had to do it to other languages that uses .NET, just to 
get them to work.  J#, Eiffel#, VB.NET...

> Besides, again, even if Mono can't communicate with MS *at all*, Mono
> would still be one hell of a useful technology, one that Ruby could at
> least make use of, if not greatly benefit from.
....
> ^,^  Again, misinformation.  .NET does not in any way put your
> information in MS's hands.  That is *only* if you use Passport or some
> other MS service.  And there, Passport does not requrie any information
> out of you for its basic usage.

Right.  Your argument was that we need Mono on Linux because Linux users 
need access to .NET services.  Passport is a part of that.

I'm still not sure what .NET is giving me.  I can already do IPC and 
distributed computing across platforms and languages with XMLRPC.  What I 
can't do is write agents in multiple language and have them run on any 
other platform, which is what C# claims to offer -- although, with Java you 
get a fairly good selection with JPython, JRuby, JavaScript, etc.

> As for C#... Well, I've not used it, but I'd certainly like to.  I like
> C/C++, and the thought of a byte-code (with JIT) C++ like language that
> is immune to things like memory leaks and buffer overruns sounds very
> interesting.

IMO, nearly anything is an improvement on C/C++, although why anyone 
expects C# runtimes to be any faster than Java runtimes is beyond me.  
Java's had years to improve its speed and JIT compilers; MS is building 
from scratch (we assume).  I haven't been very impressed with MS's 
quality of coding, so I'm not expecting much.

> Well, that is your choice.  ^,^  I simply suppose we have different
> criteria on what we base our usage of software on.

Yah.  I call mine "ethics".

Cheap shot.  But, really, when it comes down to it, that's what I believe 
my criteria are.  I don't buy from companies that blatantly pollute and I 
don't work with companies that exhibit a complete lack of business morals.

Anyway, you'll see Mono on Ruby, I have no doubt.  If I had any power to 
stop it, I wouldn't.  I'm not RMS.  Ruby is in good hands, and I trust 
Matz' judgement on where it goes.

-- 
 |..  "ROM stands for Read-Only Memory, meaning that new things cannot be
<|>    written to it; ROM is the silicon equivalent of the brain of a
/|\    religious fanatic."
/|    -- Lincoln Spector
 |