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And Microsoft's development tools are generally very popular with developers. Yes, very popular with .NET developers. That's the problem with Microsoft, everyt

by naner 16y ago

And Microsoft's development tools are generally very popular with developers. Yes, very popular with .NET developers. That's the problem with Microsoft, everything is coupled together and isolated from anything non-Microsoft. You're usually either a .NET developer or an everything-else developer. Everyone else has free development tools/environments. Everyone else has vibrant online communities. Everyone else shares and collaborates with open source projects (strategically at least).

akho 16y ago
StackOverflow is somewhat .NET-biased, and it’s probably the most vibrant online community available. Mono provides a free development tool/environment built around skills easily transferred to .NET. Microsoft even occasionally collaborates with Mono. Also, “everything is coupled together” occasionally becomes a feature. However, what do I know — I haven’t ever used a Microsoft OS on a computer I control. .NET seems nice, though.
- redthrowaway 16y ago
  As a CS student, I'm a bit surprised that our curriculum contains no .NET whatsoever. We learn Java, C and C++ (both with gcc), Python, Perl, Bash scripting and ARM assembly, plus others depending on electives. While some of the lab computers run XP, all of our work has to be platform-independent. We work in *nix, and most of the professors use MBPs. It seems to me that the program really might be selling some of our students short by not covering something as huge as .NET, but I'm not complaining.
  - MrScruff 16y ago
    I'm sure you've been told this before but it really matters very little what language you are taught in your degree. During the course of your career you'll learn many languages and APIs. It's the principles of sound software engineering that will stand you in good stead.
    - spacemanaki 16y ago
      That being said... I resent my school using (almost) only Java for its curriculum. When I started learning JavaScript, Scheme, and Common Lisp this past year and discovered languages with first class functions and closures, my feelings of resentment only grew.
  - jallmann 16y ago
    No. The .NET you have to "learn" is just a set of class libraries and interfaces, the gist of which you will get in a weekend hacking together your first C# project. Unix is the platform to teach in CS , if you should even teach towards a platform at all. Not only because *nix common in industry, but its set of small and reusable tools is well suited to the software engineering philosophy. My CS department had a course in .NET. It also had a course in XML. Why anyone would take those is baffling. Also, if all you're extracting from your CS classes are new languages to pad your resume with, then you are missing the forest for the trees.
_delirium 16y ago
Apple is fairly similar on that front. If you want to develop iPhone apps, you have to buy into the whole stack: XCode on OS X on a Mac. (Well, technically it's possible to target the iPhone via other methods, but they're not easy or supported, or in some cases even legal.)
- naner 16y ago
  Well... Microsoft is a little more weird. The company still freaks out over open source. And when they "officially" started endorsing some open source, it was in the context of their own open source licenses and their own open source hosting website. Then they try and develop web technology, Silverlight, that is better than Flash by technical standards but is so entrenched in Microsoft-land that hardly anyone wants to do anything with it. You can't author anything for it when using Apple and Linux doesn't even get a runtime (Mono doesn't count, can never be feature-complete). Apple doesn't seem quite the same. A lot of Apple developers are active in other developer communities. Microsoft developers seem to stick to Microsoft technologies. Perhaps this is because Microsoft has their own implementation of almost everything.
  - bad_user 16y ago
    > "Silverlight, that is better than Flash by technical standards but is so entrenched in Microsoft-land that hardly anyone wants to do anything with it" This is more to do with Flash being a defacto standard than anything else. I've been a Linux user since 10 years ago, and I haven't forgotten the piss-poor support of Adobe for Flash on Linux. Heck, they finally decided to start porting Flash to Linux because of competition with Silverlight. > "Mono doesn't count, can never be feature-complete" Of course Mono counts, and compared to open-source Flash clones, it is in a far better shape.
    - metageek 16y ago
      I've been a Linux user since 10 years ago, and I haven't forgotten the piss-poor support of Adobe for Flash on Linux. Hard to forget it when it won't go away. No 64-bit plugin, no accelerated video. (Their explanation that there are too many video acceleration APIs was pretty weak: if they adopted one, it would become the standard.)

by naner 16y ago

akho 16y ago

StackOverflow is somewhat .NET-biased, and it’s probably the most vibrant online community available. Mono provides a free development tool/environment built around skills easily transferred to .NET. Microsoft even occasionally collaborates with Mono. Also, “everything is coupled together” occasionally becomes a feature. However, what do I know — I haven’t ever used a Microsoft OS on a computer I control. .NET seems nice, though.

redthrowaway 16y ago
As a CS student, I'm a bit surprised that our curriculum contains no .NET whatsoever. We learn Java, C and C++ (both with gcc), Python, Perl, Bash scripting and ARM assembly, plus others depending on electives. While some of the lab computers run XP, all of our work has to be platform-independent. We work in *nix, and most of the professors use MBPs. It seems to me that the program really might be selling some of our students short by not covering something as huge as .NET, but I'm not complaining.
- MrScruff 16y ago
  I'm sure you've been told this before but it really matters very little what language you are taught in your degree. During the course of your career you'll learn many languages and APIs. It's the principles of sound software engineering that will stand you in good stead.
  - spacemanaki 16y ago
    That being said... I resent my school using (almost) only Java for its curriculum. When I started learning JavaScript, Scheme, and Common Lisp this past year and discovered languages with first class functions and closures, my feelings of resentment only grew.
- jallmann 16y ago
  No. The .NET you have to "learn" is just a set of class libraries and interfaces, the gist of which you will get in a weekend hacking together your first C# project. Unix is the platform to teach in CS , if you should even teach towards a platform at all. Not only because *nix common in industry, but its set of small and reusable tools is well suited to the software engineering philosophy. My CS department had a course in .NET. It also had a course in XML. Why anyone would take those is baffling. Also, if all you're extracting from your CS classes are new languages to pad your resume with, then you are missing the forest for the trees.

_delirium 16y ago

Apple is fairly similar on that front. If you want to develop iPhone apps, you have to buy into the whole stack: XCode on OS X on a Mac. (Well, technically it's possible to target the iPhone via other methods, but they're not easy or supported, or in some cases even legal.)

naner 16y ago
Well... Microsoft is a little more weird. The company still freaks out over open source. And when they "officially" started endorsing some open source, it was in the context of their own open source licenses and their own open source hosting website. Then they try and develop web technology, Silverlight, that is better than Flash by technical standards but is so entrenched in Microsoft-land that hardly anyone wants to do anything with it. You can't author anything for it when using Apple and Linux doesn't even get a runtime (Mono doesn't count, can never be feature-complete). Apple doesn't seem quite the same. A lot of Apple developers are active in other developer communities. Microsoft developers seem to stick to Microsoft technologies. Perhaps this is because Microsoft has their own implementation of almost everything.
- bad_user 16y ago
  > "Silverlight, that is better than Flash by technical standards but is so entrenched in Microsoft-land that hardly anyone wants to do anything with it" This is more to do with Flash being a defacto standard than anything else. I've been a Linux user since 10 years ago, and I haven't forgotten the piss-poor support of Adobe for Flash on Linux. Heck, they finally decided to start porting Flash to Linux because of competition with Silverlight. > "Mono doesn't count, can never be feature-complete" Of course Mono counts, and compared to open-source Flash clones, it is in a far better shape.
  - metageek 16y ago
    I've been a Linux user since 10 years ago, and I haven't forgotten the piss-poor support of Adobe for Flash on Linux. Hard to forget it when it won't go away. No 64-bit plugin, no accelerated video. (Their explanation that there are too many video acceleration APIs was pretty weak: if they adopted one, it would become the standard.)