Miguel de Icaza, der har været med
til at grundlægge XIMIAN, er leder af GNOME projektet og en kendt person i open
source verdenen er blevet interviewet af O'Reilly Network om sit syn på
.NET.
Icaza kommer med en lang række noget overraskende
udtalelser. For selv om han helt klart går ind for open source udvikling er han
mildest talt positiv - ja næsten begejstret - for det resultat Microsoft har
designet sig frem til med .NET frameworket. En begejstring der som det ses
nedenfor også har ført til, at XIMIAN har påbegyndt en open source
implementation af .NET teknologier og produkter.
Interviewet er blevet til en spændende blanding af både
tekniske og mere filosofiske overvejelser.
Hvis du bare vil have et executive
summary...
Får du her et par eksempler på nogle af de mere overraksende
og tankevækkende (omend givetvis subjektive) udtalelser, som han kommer med (vi
har forsøgt ikke at ødelægge citaternes kontekst, men læs selv selve
interviewet, så du får sammenhængen med).
".NET is an interesting mix of technologies," said
Miguel de Icaza. He likes the C# language, and he is particularly impressed by
.NET's component architecture and its development tools. .NET provides
developers with a state-of-the-art development environment, one that leaps ahead
of open source alternatives. "With .NET, Microsoft is starting with a clean
slate and building for the future," said de Icaza in an interview. "It's a new
development environment for the next twenty years."
"Now, with .NET, I see that the roles have changed
and Windows developers have much better tools than we [open source developers]
have. Ours are good but not as good as theirs. Theirs are better
integrated."
"With .NET, MS has figured out the next generation of
development software. So it's worth looking at." He added: "If you're a
developer, .NET has a lot of things that you're not going to find in
Linux."
Certainly, C# is similar to Java, but what de Icaza
found intriguing was that .NET was not targeted for a single language. The
problem with Java is, of course, that developers must work in Java. As a
development environment, .NET is language-agnostic. It allows developers to
program in whatever language they like. "In .NET, Microsoft has created the
common language runtime (CLR), which is a way for languages to generate code
that interoperates easily," said de Icaza. "You can have Visual Basic running in
the same environment as C#, Fortan, Pascal, or whatever. You could create a
class in C++ and pass it over to a C# object and then have it instantiated as a
Visual Basic object. It's a programmer's dream come true."
"I don't think we as a community can design something
that is going to be as completely thought out as .NET. It's taken them several
years already to design this, and I believe that Microsoft hired a lot of smart
people to build it. It would definitely take us a lot of time and debate to get
there."