Fedora meeting Mono Half-Way

[Paul A Houle]

Gianluca Sforna wrote:
> Despite I know _zero_ C#, your list list seems to be quite fulfilled
> by C++ (or, if you want to stick to higher level languages, python). I
> guess Peter's answer should be nearer to reality...
>   
    Yeah,  and you've got to get a PhD in C++ to just write "hello 
world".  When Owen Taylor was a physics grad student,  I looked over his 
shoulder at screens of immaculate pseudo-OO C that he'd write and he 
talked my ear off about what was wrong with C++.  This is why the gtk 
C++ bindings are called gtk--.

    Sure,  you can find C++ libraries for automatically managed 
objects,  safe strings,  and wonderful data structures.  Boost,  for 
instance,  is wonderful,  but I can't get it compiled on a number of 
older Linux and Solaris servers that don't have gcc 4.  For 20 years 
people have been inventing and re-inventing the wheel for doing basic 
things in C++,  so C++ code bases are painfully fragmented.

    As for Python,  the Python community makes fantastic claims about 
rapid development in Python.  So far as I can tell,  the idea is that 
you can get your application working 80% for 20% of the work,  so let's 
just do 20% of the work and say it's done.  Python has the same thread 
safety problems as PHP and Perl (it links in who knows how many unsafe 
libraries) but the Python people tell you to jump right in and use 
threads,  whereas the PHP and Perl people warn about the dangers.  In 
another thread,  people are talking about the Python bittorrent client 
-- which wouldn't run on FC3 a year ago because Python broke a bunch of 
API's.

    And don't get me started about all the GUI gadgets in FC and RHEL 
written in Python that "almost work"...  These things don't bother me 
since I just edit /etc/sysconfig,  but they certainly make Linux look 
bad in the eyes of novices.