Warranted Genuine Snarks
I have said before that I think .NET is pretty damn fantastic; however, I must admit that I really enjoy working with Java, and Java 1.5 is about to incorporate some of the very things that make .NET so fantastic.
It seems that for the first time in a while, at least on the server side, there's actual real and fair competition going on between the two communities. And I'm totally for that.
Kenneth G. Cavness (kenn@cavness.org) (http://www.cavness.org) -- Wed Oct 1 12:19:38 2003
Somehow I didn't see this until today...
If you want gee-whiz languages and technologies, you've got to follow things closer. There's some fairly sparkly stuff going on with DBUS and some other freedesktop.org standards. The subtext there is moving away from CORBA in Gnome and to a much lighter, cross-language layer, although for political reasons you don't see that talked about much. Gnome already has an XML syntax for writing UIs, along with with a program for creating them (glade and libglade, specifically). Glade is a little ugly, but it's apparently getting a facelift. GTK, the toolkit, is written in truly horrific style in C, but is available for use in many languages. Most of them are a lot more convenient than the native bindings (gtk/glade in python, for example, is really easy and about as pleasant as you could expect GUI programming to be). The text backend of GTK, Pango, is pretty slick. It supports multiple renderers, bi-directional text, etc, etc.
Some X-type people are working on Cairo, a new graphics library that ties into the slightly less new xrender extension. Using cairo provides a device independant postscript-like API that will go a long way towards fixing both the lousy vector primitives in X and the lousy printing support in Unix applications. Cairo is written in C, but already has bindings in other languages.
Software in Unix is still largely C-based, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. I'm not wild about the poor quality of implementation in many of the programs, and I agree that the effects of the crappy coding could be mitigated somewhat by more featureful languages. On the other hand, the tiny handful of programs that I trust the most are all written in C. So with careful engineering, having low-level systems written in C is not a bad thing. Having high-level GUI applications written in C is probably a waste of everyone's time, but it's not necessary even now. The tools are there, but no-one cares to use them.
And then, also, at the end of the day you've got to be running Windows to get full advantage of the .Net business. I'm just not willing to put up with that kind of pain.
Mike Bruce (bruce@jhereg.net) (http://log.ibruce.org/) -- Mon Oct 6 23:05:17 2003