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> I don't really get where you're coming up with ".NET is seen as a rather dead-end ecosystem." Say if I was writing a compiler for a new language I'm designin
by cabalamat 16y ago
> I don't really get where you're coming up with ".NET is seen as a rather dead-end ecosystem."
Say if I was writing a compiler for a new language I'm designing. Would I consider targetting .NET? No I wouldn't because it locks me in to Microsoft, and will only continue to be available at the whim of Microsoft (consider they canned VB6 when it was one of their most popular languages to replace ith with VB .NET). Now if I was to target my compiler on a platform that runs on lots of OSes, is open-source, etc, then it's more likely to be future-proof. Or say I was writing a web app framework like Rails or Django. I might want it to run on Windows, but I would certainly also want it to run on Unix-like systems such as Linux and MacOS.
The impression I get is that that is the main reason why there is less innovation in the Microsoft platform than outside it (e.g. Python, Ruby, Rails, Django, Clojure, Groovy, etc), despite Windows running on most computers. Many good programmers think Windows is simply irrelevant. E.g. PG says:
"I'm now surprised when I come across a computer running Windows. Nearly all the people we fund at Y Combinator use Apple laptops. It was the same in the audience at startup school. All the computer people use Macs or Linux now." -- http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html
All programs are written by programmers, and if enough programmers think a platform is irrelevant, it becomes so.
Now if Oracle is going to get nasty with what's now their Java platform, that's an opportunity for Microsoft if they want to take it. I've never coded in C# but from what I've read of it, it's a better language than Java and I suspect many Linux programmers would consider using it.
Microsoft is still trying to fight their old war against Linux. They've won that war on the client (but not on the server), but in the mean time, they are losing to Apple.