From: Michael Slater <slater@...>
Date: 2003-08-21T18:58:24+09:00
Subject: Re: the mindshare of Ruby (was)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Peter Hickman [mailto:peter@semantico.com]
> Sent: Thursday, August 21, 2003 1:07 AM
> To: ruby-talk ML
> Subject: Re: the mindshare of Ruby (was)
>
> True, but what I was pointing out was when the Fifth Generation Project
> was
> running there was a feeling that the world would be overrun with Prolog
> and it
> didn't happen. How we have C# from Microsoft and people think C# will take
> over the world.
> 
> Same old, same old.
> 

Well, I was at Borland when we were still selling Turbo Prolog. We certainly
were optimistic about it :-)

So far with C#, I find it far simpler than C++/MFC/ATL/WTL for Windows
development. However, outside of .NET providing a simpler API for Windows
and C# providing very nice way to use .NET, I cannot see much inspiration in
C#. Anders did a good job on the 1.0, but I think it will take a few more
years of cooking before the taste is right. It's just too much like Java
right now with that "made for functional worker units" feel to it.

If David Simmons (of S# / Smallscript) and others keep on pushing Microsoft
for better dynamic language support in .NET, we may yet see .NET come to
life with a bevy of exciting scripting languages. In many ways, .NET is a
much better infrastructure for building programs using scripting languages
than it is for systems development.

--ms