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I'd love to use C# or F# for development: they're in my opinion, superior languages to Java and Scala (respectively) -- although Scala has several salient and i
by strlen 15y ago
I'd love to use C# or F# for development: they're in my opinion, superior languages to Java and Scala (respectively) -- although Scala has several salient and interesting points (implicits, traits) that F# doesn't.
However, I am fairly well wed to Linux/OS X, and don't see myself being productive with Windows (whenever I used Windows, the first application I'd install is Cygwin), nor (having never done Windows Systems Engineering) do I know how to find a great SRE/operations engineer for a Windows system (or how to train a great Linux SRE to be a great Windows SRE). Nor can I legally setup a small cluster of Windows Server machines in my apartment (or on Ec2) to prototype the application _before_ I officially start a company (and qualify for bizpark) without paying extra costs. Ditto for setting up a developer desktop with MS Visual Studio.
I am watching Mono seriously, but for now I'd stick to C++, Erlang/OTP, OCaml, and Java/Scala as my choices (with Python or Ruby for scripting) were I to start a new project.
Addendum:
Microsoft: if you're reading this, buy Miguel De Icaza's startup. Make Linux and OS X a first class side deployment platform. Market SQL Server (which, from what I recall is superior to it's primary competitor, which is Oracle) as a way to "upsell" customers using Mono on Linux to use Windows Server (if it makes business sense for them).
- icey 15y agoIf you haven't looked at it yet, you may also like Nemerle - http://nemerle.org http://nemerle.org You don't really need Windows to write C#, F#, etc. There are emacs modes for them if you like emacs. I'm pretty sure there's an F# module for Monodevelop available. It doesn't help you with the OS situation at all, but Visual Studio express is free from Microsoft should you find yourself on Windows. I know C# better than most of the other languages in my toolkit, and it's pretty great, but I don't think that Windows is very enjoyable to use when compared to an OS with unixy underpinnings. Should you decide to check out C# or F# in more depth, I'd recommend staying on the OS you prefer. Mono is production quality today, you don't have to wait for it.
- strlen 15y ago> Mono is production quality today, you don't have to wait for it. Having looked at it myself, it just doesn't seem to the case: the only recently got support for generational garbage collection and only plan to support tail call optimization (for F#) in an upcoming release. It's still a technical risk to "bet" on Mono, much more so than on JVM or Erlang/OTP.
- pnathan 15y agoIMHO, Nemerle is the .NET language of the future. Possibly much like Common Lisp is the language of the future. ;)