Ionrock Dot Org

Well this is it! The opinion everyone was waiting for regarding the future of Gnome! Recently Havoc posted to his blog a request for discussion on the future of Gnome and where the development will go. Just in case you cannot find a link to it on slashdot, osnews, gnomdesktop.org or any of the other sites linking to it, you can click here.

The bulk of the article discussed the benefits and problems with using Java and Mono/C#. While I am a lowly web developer I like to think I have an educated opinion on the topic. I feel that C# and Mono is the only way to go. The reason being lies in the fact changing everything to Java ties people into using Java and Java only. While this seems to be no big deal in many cases I think it is not the way to include and support the community. A good example of this would be the use of Python in Gnome. If Java was it then something like gDesklets would not be possible along with a host of other projects using languages other than C.

The other side of it is that most people learn to program on the MS platform. In a perfect world this is not a problem since learning to code C or C++ should allow to you code on any platform that has a compiler for that language. The world is far from perfect so this is not the case. Java handles this problem by giving each platform a virtual machine that the code runs under making code OS agnostic but the problem (from my experience) is that you essentially have to run programs on another program essentially. This works but is not the most efficient (it kind of feels slow IMHO). With all these young folks in college learning to be C# hackers in their MIS and IST (my major) schools, it would be quite nice if they can switch to a great platform like Linux without having to relearn tons of information. If programmers try not to reinvent the wheel why then should they relearn how to create a hello world program in GTK+, QT, wxWidgets, etc. ?

The more personal side of things is that I am having to work on windows platforms more than I would like and while I mainly have messed with Cold Fusion (yuck) on these occasions it would be very nice to use ASP .NET and C# to code web pages and such. This would then prepare me to some extent to start creating Gnome apps which for myself would be very cool. So to me it is C# and Mono that is the winner in my book and I believe it will win out in the end. Since my blog is not the most thought out mediums to express opinions I am sure there are some gaps in my arguments. In any sense I am planning on learning C# so there!