novell throwing away money on this

novell throwing away money on this

Posted Nov 19, 2005 7:57 UTC (Sat) by drag (subscriber, #31333)
In reply to: novell throwing away money on this by migueldeicaza
Parent article: de Icaza: Mono directions

Why snub a new programming language and framework?

Linux has always supported all these different programming languages and whatnot. We have ruby, python, c, c++, perl, fortran, and a whole host of other languages that people use for various purposes.

Plus for Linux-on-the-desktop we need a smart interpreted language for developing applications. I use F-spot, and on a daily basis I use Tomboy. both are very nice and fairly fast. I use Beagle on my desktop, but unfortunatly it's not so hot on my PPC laptop yet.

(of course if you were talking about java no Java app will ever work in my PPC laptop since Java is non-portable. (the code is, but what is needed to run the code is not))

With Gnome before it was a principally a C-only arena.. now they are happily embracing Python and C#.. This allows developers much more time on developing GUIs, creating secure applications and the like rather then chasing around C problems constantly... Plus then you still can use C at the core for things that require good speed.

A example of a python application that I like to use is Straw, the desktop rss application for gnome.

If your a programmer for a business you can now do 'rapid application developement' using C# or Python for a Linux enviroment and tie it into databases and web apps and all sorts of stuff like that that would of been very difficult to do just a few years ago, while on Windows that was commonplace.

Plus with C# it's something that people actually KNOW. Tons and tons of people are taking classes in it. .NET books are commonplace and the number of Windows webdesigners familar with .NET and C# outnumber the number of programmers that are familar with Gnome/KDE and Linux C/C++-isms by quite a large margin. A person familar with .NET/C# in Windows can now go to Linux and make a good application or contribute to a project with almost no prior Linux experiance.

This sort of thing helps make it much easier for people to migrate from Windows business desktop to a Linux business desktop, especially for people with large numbers of users and have a need for lots of custom applications. Lots of people know how to do desktop development for Windows, almost nobody knows how to do desktop development for Linux. Now the bar for entry is much lower then it used to be.

You know.. migrate people off of Windows/Microsoft infrastructure to a Suse/Novell based enviroment is the whole goal of being Novell at this moment.

---

(Log in to post comments)