Interview with Miguel de Icaza (Netcraft) [LWN.net]

Interview with Miguel de Icaza (Netcraft)

Posted Apr 28, 2004 22:46 UTC (Wed) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

K3B might be a good one to cite; it seems to be a case where the KDE app is clearly best-in-class.

Interview with Miguel de Icaza (Netcraft)

Posted Apr 28, 2004 23:01 UTC (Wed) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link]

KDE is a successful project in its own right. It does what it's supposed to, and is (for its
complexity) reasonably fast and efficient. GNOME has a couple of advantages (among them, no
C++), but really, they're comparable projects in terms of quality.

Now, having said that, I don't use either one of 'em. :-)

Interview with Miguel de Icaza (Netcraft)

Posted Apr 28, 2004 23:23 UTC (Wed) by juanjux (guest, #11652) [Link]

Konqueror? Quanta? Kopete? Kontact? KNode? SMB4K? K3B? Juk? Kaffeine?
KDevelop? Konsole? When was the last time you really used KDE?

Interview with Miguel de Icaza (Netcraft)

Posted Apr 28, 2004 23:25 UTC (Wed) by fLameDogg (guest, #11305) [Link]

Is Miguel the guy to ask for this? ;O)

FWIW, Kmail has been pretty good for me, and there is Konqueror. I guess KHTML and KJS are at least wins for Mac people (Safari).

I do also like K3B. Now as for the list of KLosers... well, never mind.

--
fD, fLuxboxDogg

Interview with Miguel de Icaza (Netcraft)

Posted Apr 28, 2004 23:43 UTC (Wed) by XERC (guest, #14626) [Link]

I don't know about K3B, but the first time, when I tried some GUI based
CD-burning software on Linux, I had to learn mkisofs and cdrecord in detail just in order to get the GUI version to burn CD-s for me and since I then already knew, how to to it from console, I haven't bothered to take another look at any of the GUI wrappers.

Any new GUI takes some learning and I don't see the point, why I should waste my time on figuring out, what button does add which option to the final command.

CD-burning tools [OT]

Posted Apr 29, 2004 1:21 UTC (Thu) by fLameDogg (guest, #11305) [Link]

I can relate to that. I did all my cd-burning from the command line at first. Not that I was wizardly with it, but with helpful references I could get done what little burning done that I wanted to do. And, to be honest, I think it's kind of cool.

And I'm with you that there's not much point in learning a GUI only to have to grapple with the underlying tools anyway. Just use those tools; and that's what worked for me. I still use them sometimes.

F'rinstance, I had to use cdrdao directly just the other day for something K3B choked on, but for the most part, K3B has become easier for me to use. I can do things that would be (for me) fairly complex from the command line, without having to consult references. Hmm. That makes me sound lazy. Well, that's all right, I suppose I am :O)

I probably never really used the CLI CD tools often enough or frequently enough that they got bone-deep with me. If I did, I'd probably just find a GUI annoying. Take my default file manager: bash in rxvt.

I do love that the CLI tools are there, and that I know they are there. I think people who haven't at least tried them out are missing something, conceptually if nothing else.

Interview with Miguel de Icaza (Netcraft)

Posted Apr 30, 2004 2:07 UTC (Fri) by dkite (guest, #4577) [Link]

K3B is quite good at setting things up for the 4 or 5 things that you may
want to do with a burner. It just works. Quite impressive.

The original question is moot. Miguel is a commercial sales person. It's
like asking Ballmer whether he thinks any other companies software is
good.

Derek

Interview with Miguel de Icaza (Netcraft)

Posted Apr 29, 2004 13:57 UTC (Thu) by davidl (guest, #12156) [Link]

KDE itself :), Konqueror, K3B, Kontact, Kopete, Quanta, KDevelop, Qt Designer (just all the cracking development tools in general)... Basically, all the stuff that Miguel says is going to be Mozilla, Evolution or Gaim. I don't see any sign of all of that in Suse 9.1 :).

Interview with Miguel de Icaza (Netcraft)

Posted Apr 29, 2004 4:43 UTC (Thu) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]

Two comments.

First, it seems from Miguel's remarks as if he feels the proprietary XAML format is the real threat. That would make Mono not just an irrelevant sideshow and potential trap, but an actively harmful distraction from what Ximian needs to work on to keep GNOME a reasonably easy platform for corporate developers to switch to. XAML is, apparently, a data format independent of language, so what is needed, also apparently, is an XAML equivalent to Mozilla's Gecko or KDE's khtml. (Of course Mono would be too slow for this purpose.)

Second, whenever Miguel mentions C++ you may be sure he has, at most, only a faint notion of what he is talking about. Thus, his mention of C++ as a "low-level" language, equated with C, should be taken only as an expression of ignorance. (Perhaps his only exposure to something labelled C++ was Microsoft's compiler, a travesty until very recent releases.) Murray Cummings has pulled together a set of interface libraries (libgtkmm and libgnomemm, generically) to make coding GNOME applications in C++ phenomenally more pleasant and reliable than is possible in C, but Miguel doesn't seem to know about them, or him.

Interview with Miguel de Icaza (Netcraft)

Posted Apr 29, 2004 16:26 UTC (Thu) by tjc (subscriber, #137) [Link]

XAML is, apparently, a data format independent of language, so what is needed, also apparently, is an XAML equivalent to Mozilla's Gecko or KDE's khtml.

What I would like to see is a detailed comparison of MSFT XAML and Mozilla XUL/XPCOM. Both platforms are complicated, and I'm not even sure how closely they align/overlap.

Interview with Miguel de Icaza (Netcraft)

Posted Apr 30, 2004 7:11 UTC (Fri) by massimiliano (subscriber, #3048) [Link]

First of all, a disclaimer: I am part of the mono core team (I will
join it officially next Monday), so I might be biased, but for sure
I am "inside this thing".

There is something wrong in what you are saying.

About the first comment, XAML, while being XML, is not exactly
"language independant".

From what I got of XAML, it is tied to .NET, just like XUL is tied
to XPCOM (or its "live connect" thing).
I mean, the user interface description might be language independant,
but what distinguish an application from a static screenshot is the
fact that when the user acts on the interfaces, certain pieces of code
are executed in response to those events.
In XUL, you can write your event handlers in Javascript, or call XPCOM
component's methods. In Glade XML, you must name the C functions that
must be called. In XAML, under the XML UI description there is a .NET
assembly containing the event handlers (at least this is what I have
understood so far, but I am not working on this side of mono).
Given this, mono would be *required* to reimplement XAML, and not just
"irrelevant" (note that the issue wether XAML/Avalon should be actually
reimplemented is a different story).
And no, mono will not be too slow.

About the second comment... having worked and talked with Miguel for
a while, I can tell you he's not so clueless about C++ as you are
picturing him. He knows C++ is high level confronted with C, and
perfectly understands why. What he is saying is that C# is high level
compared to C++. And mind you, we also had a talk about C++ templates
compared to C# generics, and IMHO he knows what he is saying.

Miguel says that C++ is "low level" because you can still make "low
level mistakes" with it (like misuse pointers), memory management is
still in the hands of the programmer, and generally the underlying
machine's characteristics are not only perfectly visible to the
programmer, but he must know them well to avoid coding mistakes.
For the majority of the programs written today, this kind of "low level
approach" is actually dangerous, and counterproductive.

My opinion on this, after having worked extensively with C, C++ and
Java (and also perl and tcl when appropriate), is that C# is "getting
things right". Of course it is not ready/appropriate for kernel level
programming, but for GUI and "data handling" applications it is simply
fantastic. And *when* (not just if) low level coding is needed, you
can simply switch to "unsafe mode".

But I don't want to start a language war, just to point out that the
choices Miguel is doing are not so clueless.