Running .Net applications on Linux with Mono (Linux.com)

Posted Apr 26, 2006 15:45 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Running .Net applications on Linux with Mono (Linux.com) by mtk77
Parent article: Running .Net applications on Linux with Mono (Linux.com)

This seems to be a classic management misapprehension, that if you have Experience in one language it's not in any way transferrable to a new one, so that keeping your Experience with one language is worth going through any amount of hell. It seems to be the inverse of the misapprehension that states that programmers are just doing a mindless job slamming bits together like assembly-line workers: its inverse states that they're all wizards speaking one of many unique unrelated languages, so that knowledge of programming in one doesn't help with anoy of the others at all.

This is, not to put too fine a point on it, not true. All languages have their own idioms, and hopping between distant parts of the language family tree (say, Haskell and SQL, or POP-11 and C#) might indeed be tricky, but moving around in the little Algol-derived family (say, from C# to C++, or from C# to Java or even C) is really not that hard.

(IMHO, anyway. But then anyone half-decent knows lots of languages anyway. Miguel certainly does. But then Miguel didn't come out with this silly line in any case.)