But if you tell Mono a Closed Source SDK, you have absolutely no plan what it is.

And I think what poeple really like is C#. And the “plain” approach –> a Language of your flavor, a compiler, and the CLI. You don’t need anything more.

Mono is just a framwork build on top of it.

There arent much languages out there which can really be compared to it (to be honest, I like the new version of java). But C++ and Python and completly different.

But JAVA was to restrictive in the past (my opionion).

This happened to me when MS stopped supporting and dropped MS Macro Language in Excel for Visual Basic. Apparently MS had Excel stop supporting macros to force developers to upgrade. My project didn’t have the funding to re-write, so the thousands of lines of code became useless with little warning. After 2 years, MS began supporting macros again, but by then, the project (and business) was dust. If this had been an open-source language, I could have forked the project, if only locally. Live and learn: I won’t depend on closed-source SDKs again.

The only language that even comes close right now is “D”, but “D” is a niche language with a small community. Another platform that might replace Mono is LLVM, but that, too, is a long way off.

I have yet to see a convincing legal argument against Mono. All the claims of patent threats seem like FUD to me.

More importantly, anybody wanting to replace Mono with something else needs to go further than merely providing a better technology: they need to come up with a reasonable strategy to make that language mainstream.

Brett, Nathaneal, I have another post on this blog about the decision to use Mono. I decided on it by a process of elimination, after exploring writing Gtk+ apps in C, Python, Vala, Java, Boo, Haskell, Clojure, and OCaml. I am kind of a PL weenie and I know many languages, so I implemented basic Gtk+ examples in most of those languages (the ones that had Gtk+ bindings in a reasonable state) and found that C# on Mono gave me a statically typed language, pretty good performance, tons of support, preexisting applications to learn from, well maintained documentation, bindings, and libraries, and published books on .NET/C#/Mono.

At first, I viewed C# as merely a better version of Java and became a bit bored with the language about a year and a half ago. I started writing a lot of Haskell, and C# just didn’t seem fun enough to warrant coding in my spare time. After C# 3.0 came out, I fell in LOVE with the language — LINQ, lambdas, and type inference made it really easy to do the kind of higher-order programming I thoroughly enjoy. Microsoft Research employs a group of really brainy PL researchers like Eric Meijer and Simon-Peyton Jones, so a lot of functional features from languages like F# and Haskell are making their way into successive generations of C#. It really is a cutting-edge language in mainstream language clothing

I would like to know why, as a developer who is considering Mono but tends to prefer to stick to more established, long-tested platforms, for futureproofing.

(I really should get around to writing my ‘version of make which actually works correcly for complex projects, like PROLOG does’, though. It’s hilariously absurd that nobody has done this correctly in *any* of these postmodern development environments — I guess nobody studies PROLOG any more)

Why? Could you point us to some such explanations?

I think you might want to make a post (when you have time and your fingers stop bleeding from Paper Cuts) on why you like C#. I’m about to learn C# for my CS degree here in Canada and it seems to be of significant debate to the FOSS community so I think many people, including myself would be interested in hearing what you have to say.

Also, I read that you worked for IdeaLab and now you’re working for Canonical, but above you also said you did some Python programming for Google. Your work background sounds pretty extensive, mind making a post or a quick comment on it?

Best of luck to you at Canonical! Hope your dream of Banshee becoming the default audio player comes true too!

Switch to KDE and Kubuntu.

If enough people are seen to be switching because of Mono, it will be dropped.

But seriously FFS there is no point to removing Mono. It’s a open source RAD development framework with good performance! It’s not like Vala which is new, it’s got a large base of professionals already versed in it’s development practices. It’s sheer existence encourages Linux development. It’s a very good thing ™.

IMO if we ignore Mono we hurt the Linux desktop.