Re: afraid of .NET


"Lion-O" <nosp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:slrne21bmm.4o3.nosp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

This isn't much different from MS promoting certain means off communication
(Messenger) vs. all the other options which still remain available (irc).
People will start on Messenger but that doesn't mean IRC is at an end. In fact;
you see that most people who are into this kind of thing use both forms of
media.

Well, I feel MSN and IRC solve two different problems. MSN, to me, is more for "one on one" communication, and IRC is more of a round-table, everyone at the same time, communication. I personally don't use IRC much, 'cause on all the channels I've been to, there's a lot of elitism (e.g. this whole "voice" thing as a badge proving you're "cool" on non-muted channels).

In the IM market, I used to run 4 clients: ICQ, YIM, AIM and MSN (I didn't use a unified client like Jabber or GAIM, because I use the "fancy" features like shared whiteboards, etc.) but now I find almost everyone I know is switching to MSN, so now I regularly only run 2 client: the MSN one, and GAIM. I use GAIM now because there's a few "loyals" who refuse to budge from their protocol of choice, but the cost of running4 clients now outweights the gain from being able to use the advance features with such a small group of people.


Will .NET kill Java as Explorer killed Netscape?

I wasn't aware it killed Netscape. Netscape is still around, the successor
Mozilla even stronger than previously before.

Back in the day, Netscape Navigator 3 and Internet Explorer 3 were neck at neck (i.e. at the 50%-50% point). As a web developer, you had to memorize all these hacks to make the pages look good on both browsers. Then, Netscape "gave up", and it essentially became 99% Internet Explorer, and so some web developers went for IE-only sites. Then FireFox came along, and grew pretty quickly. I think FireFox is at 10% now, or something like that? It's nowhere near where Netscape Navigator 3 was though. I also think Opera is gaining ground now. I wouldn't be overly surprised if, in a few years, Opera beats out Firefox.

Anyway, long story short, IE did slaughter Netscape pretty bad. FireFox (and thus the Mozilla project) is making a come back, but it's nowhere near where it used to be, and the growth is slowing down now, I think.


In this case the comparison isn't that easy to make. While you're right about
MS allowing free usage of their tools you'll still be bound to restrictions.
You need to register and you'll be allowed to use their tools for 1 year,
whatever happens beyond that is still unknown.

Next is the quality of the tools. The moment people who may begin on .NET
technology start diving into this platform some further then they'll quickly
encounter the limitations placed upon them. By then your remaining choice will
be paying up for the group/enterprise -based programming environments or to
start looking around.

When it comes to stimulating developers I'd say MS is only at the beginning of
a traject which has already been passed by Sun.

I don't know what you're referring to above, when you say "restrictions", "register", "limitations", etc.


I wouldn't expect people to run over to .NET just because MS made some beginner
aimed tools freely available.

Actually, "targetting beginners" seems to be a proven solution. Why? Because the vast majority of people who take an interest in some hobby are beginners at it. Only a small portion of these people are "experts". If you can get all the beginners to use .NET, then in a few years, when they become experts (and when the old experts have retired), all the experts will be using .NET.

I claim this "target beginners" strategy is one of the reasons for the popularity of PHP/MySQL, even though both are usually considered "toy languages" by the "experts".


Why does SUN does not understand that Java should be shipped freely in every
Linux box?

Since when is that up to Sun? I'd say that its not Sun but the several
distribution maintainers who have a say in this. Sun already makes Java freely
available for Linux, its up to the several maintainers to pick this up.

Sun is making Java "free" as in beer, but not everyone agrees that it's "free" as in freedom. I having taken a close look at the licenses in question, so I don't really know how much merit this argument has, but I know some of my hardcore GNU/GPL friends refuse to use Java because of its license.


Sun should make any possibile effort to convince the PC manufacturers to ship
Java right now and even after Vista, in my humble opinion.

I don't agree there. That will only result in people getting outdated JVM's on
their machines which can result in quite a collection after a few upgrades. The
current model is just fine, the moment an applet is run people are being
pointed to a site where they can grab Java. They only have to click a few
buttons and they're done.

It breaks my heart every time I tell someone to check out my applet, and they tell me they're missing a plugin. It implies that the JVM isn't automatically being installed for them. For some users, that's enough of a deterrent to dismiss Java altogether.

If Sun convinced PC manufacturers to ship with JRE 1.5.0 at least, then the JRE could take care of updating itself from then on. Yes, there's a problem with each upgrade taking up more and more diskspace, but I bet Sun could easily fix this if they really wanted to. They'd just reprogram the installer to remove older versions by default, and provide an option for "expert users" to allow the older versions to co-exist. Like I said, that's an EASY fix. The DIFFICULT part is going to all the PC manufacturers and convincing them to bundle Java with their machines.

[...]

Competition never hurt anyone. It might even open up new options and move Java
into other interesting directions.

Some people feel that Java is adding too much syntactic sugar as of 1.5, and that if this keeps happening, it's going to end up as a messy, unelegant language.

- Oliver

.