10 ms·

I feel very similarly, but then I'm of the mind that if I can't apt-get it, I'm not interested, and I'll bet that "open source" doesn't mean to MS what it means

I feel very similarly, but then I'm of the mind that if I can't apt-get it, I'm not interested, and I'll bet that "open source" doesn't mean to MS what it means to the open source world. As for the NIH syndrome, one of my favorite Paul Graham essays is still "What Languages Fix" (http://www.paulgraham.com/fix.html http://www.paulgraham.com/fix.html) particularly for C#: the problem that C# was invented to solve is that Microsoft doesn't control Java.

Silfen 10y ago
C# incidentally solved many other shortcomings with Java. The languages are getting closer to parity, but for many years C# was pretty far ahead (if you only consider language features and not tooling/ecosystem). Between reified generics, better native interop, and many functional features, C# felt and feels more concise than idiomatic Java. And I've written plenty of both. Disclaimer: MSFT employee expressing personal views
- jimmaswell 10y ago
  In what way was C#'s tooling not better?
  - artimaeis 10y ago
    Java seemed to have a lot more options for deployments and monitoring for a long time. More advanced 3rd party libraries in general. It had simply been around longer and thus had those tools available. Now that C# has been standard for a while almost all of those tools have a C# equivalent. As a .NET dev I'd actually argue that the things available to C# now are actually better (especially Visual Studio), but that's certainly biased.
    - jimmaswell 10y ago
      VS was probably always a better coding and debugging environment. I've used VS as far back as VS 2010 and it's always been great for C#, but I've never had more than a mediocre experience writing Java in an IDE. Did anything support VS's level of convenient debugging ability for Java?
      - pkd 10y ago
        I have not used VS as much as I have used Java IDEs, but I'd say they are on par. VS shines in how well the debugger is integrated with the rest of the environment, but both NetBeans and IDEA offer very close to the same level of convenience. Admittedly, I have never liked the Eclipse debugger.
    - bad_user 10y ago
      Meh, to make Visual Studio do IDE-like things, people install things like ReSharper, built by the same people that are building IntelliJ IDEA. And I worked with both and IntelliJ is much smarter, and has support for way more technologies. And yes, it's built in Java and can be sluggish, but then again I'm using it on both Linux and OS X and runs just fine on Windows too, so it doesn't tie me to an OS I don't want. Also, I keep mentioning this, but .NET lacks a build tool like Maven or something similar (SBT, Gradle, Leiningen). .NET is still at the level of Ant / Make and .NET devs don't realize what a huge difference that is.
      - jimmaswell 10y ago
        What am I missing building projects with VS or xbuild?
        Nullabillity 10y ago
        For one, sane dependency management that doesn't require vendoring.
        jimmaswell 10y ago
        You can reference projects or other files that are in submodules. What about the .NET build process makes vendoring the only option? Even so, it's always been more convenient in my experience when something just ships with fixed versions of dependencies already inside it. Those versions are known to work with the codebase and there's no chance of new bugs or other incompatible behavior being introduced from updates to the dependencies.
        Nullabillity 10y ago
        > What about the .NET build process makes vendoring the only option? AFAIK, even NuGet doesn't allow you to just check in the dependency spec, rather than the contents of all of your dependencies. > Even so, it's always been more convenient in my experience when something just ships with fixed versions of dependencies already inside it. I agree. But that doesn't mean that they belong in Git, nor that they should even be copied to every single project.
    - vardump 10y ago
      > ...things available to C# now are actually better (especially Visual Studio), but that's certainly biased. You call Visual Studio good? Have you actually used it? VS2015 is painfully slow, and yes, I've installed all of the updates and I have no plugins or such. Heck, even Eclipse feels zippy compared to it. Something as simple as finding next text search match takes about a second. Changing to a different source code tab is also sluggish. Context sensitive search (right click identifier -> Find All References) is useless for anything that is even a bit generic. Instead of actually analyzing context, it seems to simply grep all reachable files for a text string. Including SDK headers... I use VS2015 only for C++, maybe that can have something to do with it. Maybe it works better for C#? I also dislike how I have to login to use an IDE. Once it cost me 30 minutes of working time, I couldn't login to a god damn IDE that had an expired license. That's a great way to make developers hate your product and ecosystem.
      - to3m 10y ago
        There's a box you can tick that says no to all of that stuff, though I don't know if you can access it after the first run. (I never have to log in when I run Visual Studio.)
        vardump 10y ago
        No, at least in the version I have, license expires quickly. If I don't enter the credentials, it won't be able to renew the license, so it's not possible to use it at all. Regardless of any checkbox ticks.
      - jimmaswell 10y ago
        It is a lot better for C#. All the features work perfectly for .NET languages, but because of the nature of C++ it's a lot harder to get these kinds of things working well with it. Some answers about why are here: https://www.quora.com/Why-is-C++-intellisense-so-bad-in-Visual-Studio https://www.quora.com/Why-is-C++-intellisense-so-bad-in-Visu... Eclipse can run better on a potato but it's also very simplistic. You should also be able to turn off most of the features you don't want in VS.
    - tracker1 10y ago
      I'd have to agree, though I spend most of my time in the node space, today via VS Code (though I don't use the debugger at all). VS Proper with C# has felt better to work with than any Java tool/project I've ever used, though haven't done much with that ever. I jumped on the C# bandwagon in late 2001, early 2002 when it was still in development. Started moving over towards node around 5-6 years ago, and am currently looking for a reason to work with rust or go. Most of my issues with C# have always, like Java, been about "Enterprise" frameworks, patters and practices implemented where they aren't needed, and complexity for complexity's sake. VS + C# is pretty damned nice, if you can work on a green project and not bring in everything under the sun.
baq 10y ago
except that C# as a language is by leaps and bounds better than Java (both in syntax and useful features departments), so there have been other problems to solve, too.
- deno 10y ago
  Its ecosystem isn’t. C# will never get accepted as an open source product. It only has open source code, it’s not actually ‘open-source.’ Compare it with Typescript, which—despite originating from Microsoft—is a truly open project, and getting love left and right. C# might be better than Java/JVM, but it’s not better enough. The culture/ecosystem barrier is so high that C# would have to be miles ahead, technically superior in every way, to overcome it. I do hate the “worse is better” adage, but there’s no mistaking it, it applies here. It’s just too little, too late. But Typescript is awesome, keep it up. Ironically, Google’s competitor (Closure Compiler) has actually been unsuccessful for similar reasons. To this date its main repo is just a clone of the internal master. For whatever reason they’ve never attempted to rebase on open-source release.
  - baq 10y ago
    i have a hard time with this argument. on one hand what you say is true: C# is a strictly smaller community than java. OTOH that's true of pretty much any language, and yet python, ruby, elixir, swift, golang, etc. communities are healthy and vibrant. if what you really mean is 'java people won't switch to C# anyway', then i agree, but C# isn't a really a language for them. it's a language for people who don't like and/or aren't forced to use java by their employers.
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      As if C# were any less driven by PHB-dictated internal enterprise mandates than Java is.
    - deno 10y ago
      People who aren’t forced to use Java will choose Scala or other JVM langs, like Kotlin, Ceylon (a favorite of mine) or even Clojure. C# the language is not exactly that exciting. I get it, it looks attractive next to Java, but it’s still a verbose, corporate-first, sort of thing. If anything, F# is much more competitive. Too bad it’s on CLR.
palunon 10y ago
>and I'll bet that "open source" doesn't mean to MS what it means to the open source world The github repo use the MIT licence, so I don't see what you're talking about. If you want it in your distribution repos, ask your distribution maintainers (and I bet Microsoft is going to do so anyway for the big ones)
- thepeque 10y ago
  Yes, please ask them....happy to help adding PowerShell to any distribution .NET Core supports.
robotresearcher 10y ago
> if I can't apt-get it, I'm not interested, It was released just now, under MIT license. Give it a little time and it'll show up.
- adamkruszewski 10y ago
  Or even more! It will need to be backported to Trusty Tahr if one wants to apt-get it on Windows (subsystem for Linux) ;-)
  - voltagex_ 10y ago
    WSL will end up on Xenial at least.
LamaOfRuin 10y ago
>I'll bet that "open source" doesn't mean to MS what it means to the open source world. Before Satya Nadella took over it didn't. Now it mostly seems to.
darklajid 10y ago
》I'll bet that "open source" doesn't mean to MS what it means to the open source world. That doesn't make sense. ASP.Net, .Net Core, F# are all good examples of open source projects. This announcement promises the same for Powershell: Development with the community. What are you missing? What's the criticism? If you want to see a broken open source project, check out Android instead..
Jayku1 10y ago
Ah, that's beautiful. Using a true-Scotsman argument to claim it's not "Real" open source, while denigrating Microsoft for NIH. Classic.
tzs 10y ago
> As for the NIH syndrome, one of my favorite Paul Graham essays is still "What Languages Fix" (http://www.paulgraham.com/fix.html http://www.paulgraham.com/fix.html) particularly for C#: the problem that C# was invented to solve is that Microsoft doesn't control Java. That's not what Graham said. He said, "C#: Java is controlled by Sun", which is quite a bit different from Microsoft not controlling Java. Microsoft is fine with using and promoting languages they do not control. C++, for example. The problem with Java from Microsoft's point of view was that Sun did not want people to use Java as a mere programming language. They saw Java as a platform, and wanted people to develop for that platform instead of developing for Windows, or Mac, or Linux, or whatever. Sun wanted all access from Java programs to the underlying facilities of the OS upon which a particular instance of the Java platform ran to go through the Java platform. Microsoft wanted something with the good parts of the Java language without the baggage and restrictions of the Java platform, and so they made C#.
59nadir 10y ago
> ... if I can't apt-get it, I'm not interested ... I feel bad for you, then. The Ubuntu repos (and Debian) have almost nothing that is even remotely new and will usually be behind on most things. Trying to keep configs for an ArchLinux box and Ubuntu box synchronized is a bitch if new versions have good features, because you can't use them in your general config unless you give up on apt and install from source.

Silfen 10y ago

C# incidentally solved many other shortcomings with Java. The languages are getting closer to parity, but for many years C# was pretty far ahead (if you only consider language features and not tooling/ecosystem). Between reified generics, better native interop, and many functional features, C# felt and feels more concise than idiomatic Java. And I've written plenty of both. Disclaimer: MSFT employee expressing personal views

jimmaswell 10y ago
In what way was C#'s tooling not better?
- artimaeis 10y ago
  Java seemed to have a lot more options for deployments and monitoring for a long time. More advanced 3rd party libraries in general. It had simply been around longer and thus had those tools available. Now that C# has been standard for a while almost all of those tools have a C# equivalent. As a .NET dev I'd actually argue that the things available to C# now are actually better (especially Visual Studio), but that's certainly biased.
  - jimmaswell 10y ago
    VS was probably always a better coding and debugging environment. I've used VS as far back as VS 2010 and it's always been great for C#, but I've never had more than a mediocre experience writing Java in an IDE. Did anything support VS's level of convenient debugging ability for Java?
    - pkd 10y ago
      I have not used VS as much as I have used Java IDEs, but I'd say they are on par. VS shines in how well the debugger is integrated with the rest of the environment, but both NetBeans and IDEA offer very close to the same level of convenience. Admittedly, I have never liked the Eclipse debugger.
  - bad_user 10y ago
    Meh, to make Visual Studio do IDE-like things, people install things like ReSharper, built by the same people that are building IntelliJ IDEA. And I worked with both and IntelliJ is much smarter, and has support for way more technologies. And yes, it's built in Java and can be sluggish, but then again I'm using it on both Linux and OS X and runs just fine on Windows too, so it doesn't tie me to an OS I don't want. Also, I keep mentioning this, but .NET lacks a build tool like Maven or something similar (SBT, Gradle, Leiningen). .NET is still at the level of Ant / Make and .NET devs don't realize what a huge difference that is.
    - jimmaswell 10y ago
      What am I missing building projects with VS or xbuild?
      - Nullabillity 10y ago
        For one, sane dependency management that doesn't require vendoring.
        jimmaswell 10y ago
        You can reference projects or other files that are in submodules. What about the .NET build process makes vendoring the only option? Even so, it's always been more convenient in my experience when something just ships with fixed versions of dependencies already inside it. Those versions are known to work with the codebase and there's no chance of new bugs or other incompatible behavior being introduced from updates to the dependencies.
        Nullabillity 10y ago
        > What about the .NET build process makes vendoring the only option? AFAIK, even NuGet doesn't allow you to just check in the dependency spec, rather than the contents of all of your dependencies. > Even so, it's always been more convenient in my experience when something just ships with fixed versions of dependencies already inside it. I agree. But that doesn't mean that they belong in Git, nor that they should even be copied to every single project.
  - vardump 10y ago
    > ...things available to C# now are actually better (especially Visual Studio), but that's certainly biased. You call Visual Studio good? Have you actually used it? VS2015 is painfully slow, and yes, I've installed all of the updates and I have no plugins or such. Heck, even Eclipse feels zippy compared to it. Something as simple as finding next text search match takes about a second. Changing to a different source code tab is also sluggish. Context sensitive search (right click identifier -> Find All References) is useless for anything that is even a bit generic. Instead of actually analyzing context, it seems to simply grep all reachable files for a text string. Including SDK headers... I use VS2015 only for C++, maybe that can have something to do with it. Maybe it works better for C#? I also dislike how I have to login to use an IDE. Once it cost me 30 minutes of working time, I couldn't login to a god damn IDE that had an expired license. That's a great way to make developers hate your product and ecosystem.
    - to3m 10y ago
      There's a box you can tick that says no to all of that stuff, though I don't know if you can access it after the first run. (I never have to log in when I run Visual Studio.)
      - vardump 10y ago
        No, at least in the version I have, license expires quickly. If I don't enter the credentials, it won't be able to renew the license, so it's not possible to use it at all. Regardless of any checkbox ticks.
    - jimmaswell 10y ago
      It is a lot better for C#. All the features work perfectly for .NET languages, but because of the nature of C++ it's a lot harder to get these kinds of things working well with it. Some answers about why are here: https://www.quora.com/Why-is-C++-intellisense-so-bad-in-Visual-Studio https://www.quora.com/Why-is-C++-intellisense-so-bad-in-Visu... Eclipse can run better on a potato but it's also very simplistic. You should also be able to turn off most of the features you don't want in VS.
  - tracker1 10y ago
    I'd have to agree, though I spend most of my time in the node space, today via VS Code (though I don't use the debugger at all). VS Proper with C# has felt better to work with than any Java tool/project I've ever used, though haven't done much with that ever. I jumped on the C# bandwagon in late 2001, early 2002 when it was still in development. Started moving over towards node around 5-6 years ago, and am currently looking for a reason to work with rust or go. Most of my issues with C# have always, like Java, been about "Enterprise" frameworks, patters and practices implemented where they aren't needed, and complexity for complexity's sake. VS + C# is pretty damned nice, if you can work on a green project and not bring in everything under the sun.

baq 10y ago

except that C# as a language is by leaps and bounds better than Java (both in syntax and useful features departments), so there have been other problems to solve, too.

deno 10y ago
Its ecosystem isn’t. C# will never get accepted as an open source product. It only has open source code, it’s not actually ‘open-source.’ Compare it with Typescript, which—despite originating from Microsoft—is a truly open project, and getting love left and right. C# might be better than Java/JVM, but it’s not better enough. The culture/ecosystem barrier is so high that C# would have to be miles ahead, technically superior in every way, to overcome it. I do hate the “worse is better” adage, but there’s no mistaking it, it applies here. It’s just too little, too late. But Typescript is awesome, keep it up. Ironically, Google’s competitor (Closure Compiler) has actually been unsuccessful for similar reasons. To this date its main repo is just a clone of the internal master. For whatever reason they’ve never attempted to rebase on open-source release.
- baq 10y ago
  i have a hard time with this argument. on one hand what you say is true: C# is a strictly smaller community than java. OTOH that's true of pretty much any language, and yet python, ruby, elixir, swift, golang, etc. communities are healthy and vibrant. if what you really mean is 'java people won't switch to C# anyway', then i agree, but C# isn't a really a language for them. it's a language for people who don't like and/or aren't forced to use java by their employers.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    As if C# were any less driven by PHB-dictated internal enterprise mandates than Java is.
  - deno 10y ago
    People who aren’t forced to use Java will choose Scala or other JVM langs, like Kotlin, Ceylon (a favorite of mine) or even Clojure. C# the language is not exactly that exciting. I get it, it looks attractive next to Java, but it’s still a verbose, corporate-first, sort of thing. If anything, F# is much more competitive. Too bad it’s on CLR.

palunon 10y ago

>and I'll bet that "open source" doesn't mean to MS what it means to the open source world The github repo use the MIT licence, so I don't see what you're talking about. If you want it in your distribution repos, ask your distribution maintainers (and I bet Microsoft is going to do so anyway for the big ones)

thepeque 10y ago
Yes, please ask them....happy to help adding PowerShell to any distribution .NET Core supports.

robotresearcher 10y ago

> if I can't apt-get it, I'm not interested, It was released just now, under MIT license. Give it a little time and it'll show up.

adamkruszewski 10y ago
Or even more! It will need to be backported to Trusty Tahr if one wants to apt-get it on Windows (subsystem for Linux) ;-)
- voltagex_ 10y ago
  WSL will end up on Xenial at least.

LamaOfRuin 10y ago

>I'll bet that "open source" doesn't mean to MS what it means to the open source world. Before Satya Nadella took over it didn't. Now it mostly seems to.

darklajid 10y ago

》I'll bet that "open source" doesn't mean to MS what it means to the open source world. That doesn't make sense. ASP.Net, .Net Core, F# are all good examples of open source projects. This announcement promises the same for Powershell: Development with the community. What are you missing? What's the criticism? If you want to see a broken open source project, check out Android instead..

Jayku1 10y ago

Ah, that's beautiful. Using a true-Scotsman argument to claim it's not "Real" open source, while denigrating Microsoft for NIH. Classic.

tzs 10y ago

> As for the NIH syndrome, one of my favorite Paul Graham essays is still "What Languages Fix" (http://www.paulgraham.com/fix.html http://www.paulgraham.com/fix.html) particularly for C#: the problem that C# was invented to solve is that Microsoft doesn't control Java. That's not what Graham said. He said, "C#: Java is controlled by Sun", which is quite a bit different from Microsoft not controlling Java. Microsoft is fine with using and promoting languages they do not control. C++, for example. The problem with Java from Microsoft's point of view was that Sun did not want people to use Java as a mere programming language. They saw Java as a platform, and wanted people to develop for that platform instead of developing for Windows, or Mac, or Linux, or whatever. Sun wanted all access from Java programs to the underlying facilities of the OS upon which a particular instance of the Java platform ran to go through the Java platform. Microsoft wanted something with the good parts of the Java language without the baggage and restrictions of the Java platform, and so they made C#.

59nadir 10y ago

> ... if I can't apt-get it, I'm not interested ... I feel bad for you, then. The Ubuntu repos (and Debian) have almost nothing that is even remotely new and will usually be behind on most things. Trying to keep configs for an ArchLinux box and Ubuntu box synchronized is a bitch if new versions have good features, because you can't use them in your general config unless you give up on apt and install from source.