Microsoft opening up .NET

[Mike O'Dell]

Most of the Windoze programs you'd really like running
cross-platform are still written primarily in C++ and
are tightly bound to the Win32 API. Even if the CLR -
Common Language Runtime - runs on multiple platforms,
it's very unclear how the Win32 API calls get handled.
That is what Wine and such do and I doubt seriously
that's going away any time soon.

that said, Microsoft *is* working hard to make Office
genuinely cross-platform for some definition of that term.
So far, that means Office 365 available on multiple platforms
with the exception of Office for OSX. it seems that the
codebase for the OSX version is actually ahead of the
Windoze version. Maybe that means moving some or a lot
of it to CLR/.NET - maybe not.  I suspect Office is at
the heart of the strategy, though, because it has
long been the case that the primary reason the vast
majority of Windoze users ran it was to run Office.
It's Office people want, *not* Windows. I think the new
guy gets it - put Windows on everything reasonable and
just collect the money - don't argue about what kind
of car they bought - just take their money.

It is the case, though, that Java is the unassailble 
standard in the Enterprise Software World. MS completely 
missed the boat by playing hard to get. 
The ready cross-platform availability of Java
let it simply explode. There are far more Java
developers in the world than .Net or native Windoze.

That's unfortunate because C# had
the advantage of looking at several years of Java experience
and then avoiding some of the design "challenges" in Java.
so out the chute, C# was a better language and CLR had
much better support for dynamic dispatch languages than
the JVM. The JVM stuff has been fixed and many, if not all,
of the misfeatures in Java have been fixed or at least
ameliorated.

The tragedy is that this could have happened at least
10 years ago if Balmer had not been CEO. Why fight the
next war when you have so much experience fighting the
last one?

It will certainly be interesting to see what happens, though.

BTW - in the latest ACM survey, the instructional language
that is rapidly displacing Java in intro CS courses is

     PYTHON!

they do more, they learn more, and enjoy it more.

Most of Facebook and Amazon Web Services is written in Python.

     -mo