Mac vs. PC

[Durandal]

What irritated the heck out of me in that article is that the author did not touch on .NET. It has been well established since the 1990s that Win32 is a living nightmare of an API. For the past several years, Microsoft has been aggressively touting .NET as the method-of-choice for programming Windows applications. IMO the author's article would have been rather more relevant if it had compared .NET with Cocoa.

You might want to read the rather large discussion thread about that article. He goes into the various reasons why he hates .Net (not the least of which being incomplete coverage of Win32 functionality). It is a 3-part article, and I'm sure he'll touch on it.

I've never used .Net, but I've heard lots of good things. From the sample code I've seen though, it looks like they copied every stupid syntax decision that C++ made and Java copied, making for a very, very ugly-looking language. And I hate that the method naming convention demotes acronym capitalizations beyond the first letter. It just looks awful. It should be "object.getIOStream", not "object.getIoStream".

[RThurmont]

C# code does indeed look much like C and Java to me, from what I've seen about it (and in a bad way). That said, there is also Visual Basic (although that appeals to me very little, given how different it is from C and Ruby, and the fact that it doesn't look to me like you get much for that difference). There are also Python and Ruby implementations for .NET, as well as other languages.

The one nice thing about .NET does seem to be its ability to handle multiple languages, and the CLR of it is availible under a BSD style license. The Mono people have been talking about Moonlight (the Linux Silverlight clone, which MS is apparently sponsoring, but which still does not yet fully "work") as a means of developing desktop applications, so we'll see what that's like.

Anyway, thanks for your post, that was interesting.