MIX - Novell's de Icaza criticizes Microsoft patent deal (LinuxWorld)

Yes it's very nice.. If I can program in pyGTK then anybody can.

I am not a big language lawyer, but three instances I can see are that Mono is faster then
python in most respects.

1)
In the 'language shootout' Mono is only 2-3 slower then GNU C/C++ in most benchmarks were as
Python is much much slower in most respects.
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=...
http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/gp4/benchmark.php?test=...

Although Python seems to be better with memory management. So Python is suitable for utilities
and smaller long-running stuff were as Mono would be more suitable for making applications
that will end up being much more involved or more complex.


2) 
Lots of people (I expect people coming from a C++ or Java background) do not really like
Python. So having something like C# is probably more attractive for them. I figure giving
people a choice between C, C#, and Python is giving people a good spread of options from
low-level to very high-level languages.

3) 
Thanks to Microsoft C# is a insanely popular language. For new programmers having something
that _seems_ fast is attractive and is something they went to school for. I mean schools are
cranking out .NET programmers left and right. So if they want to program for Linux then having
to learn a new framework is probably easier then making them learn a new language and a new
framework at the same time.



I am no language lawyer and I don't want to get in a big arguement over this vs that, mostly
because I don't really know.. All I've realy looked at is Python and a tiny bit of C, but it's
my impression that having something like C# is a good thing.

Maybe it's a question of Gnome supporting Java vs Mono as a top tier Gnome language. One of
the wonderful things about Python is that's not written by python-nazis.. that you can
incorporate C and libraries written in other languages into your python program, usually
without to much heartache.. It's difficult sometimes, but not a deal breaker. Having bindings
for C or C++ libraries for python is a fairly natural thing to have. It seems to me that Java
is always Java-this and Java-that.. that unless something is written in java it's very hard to
use in Java programs.

It seems that Mono is more accepting of libraries written in other languages like Python is. 

Again I don't know this for a fact, but it's the general impression that I get.