From: RayLopez99 on
Don't take my word for it, see what this nationally syndicated author
and computer programming guru says... and note the reader's comment at
the very end...about Linux...I think he's talking about Linux.

Anyway the takeaway executive summary of this article is simple: C#
rulz.

RL

http://programmingzen.com/2010/06/23/how-microsoft-is-changing-the-programming-world/

How Microsoft is changing the programming world
Posted on Jun 23rd, 2010 in .NET, Programming Languages | 47 comments

Several years ago I knew a programmer, we’ll call him Joe, who fancied
himself to be a great developer. He was a senior developer at “Big
Co.”, who received a large enough pay check to just as easily
compensate a few junior developers.

The guy had Microsoft certifications, as expected of one in his
position, and he appeared to know Visual Studio inside and out, just
as you’d imagine.

What was surprising for me at the time, was that as I got to know Joe
better, I slowly started to realize that the guy was absolutely
clueless about programming beyond the scope of the Microsoft bubble.

He had never used Linux in his life, nor was he interested in learning
about it. He wasn’t aware of tools like CVS or SVN. He didn’t seem
familiar with the ideas behind unit testing or Agile methodologies;
words like “refactoring” were outside of Joe’s vocabulary.

How about other programming languages or paradigms, like functional
programming? Nope, nothing there either. He knew Visual Basic 6 and
VB.NET, C# (the first release at the time) and a bit of C++. That’s
it. And he was proud of it. As I enquired further in an attempt to
figure out what he was all about, he didn’t mind admitting to a
complete ignorance of what wasn’t printed on Microsoft paper.

What’s interesting is that, despite his cluelessness – due to a strict
adherence to the Microsoft view of the programming world – and perhaps
a lack of intellectual curiosity, the guy did manage to be somewhat
adequate at his job. Not spectacular by any stretch of the
imagination, but good enough to keep his well paid job.

Joe simply didn’t care about tools and techniques that fell outside of
the narrow, yet mainstream, beaten Microsoft path.

Over the years I’ve met countless Joes. In fact, if I were to
generalize and characterize many Microsoft developers in the early
2000s, Joe would come to mind like an unpleasant stereotype.

I tell this story not to criticize Joe or to claim that Microsoft
developers suck. On the contrary, my argument is that Microsoft will
be a key factor in terms of enabling functional programming to become
mainstream. In fact, what Microsoft is doing is introducing .NET
developers to functional programming, one piece at a time.

Just a few days ago I was reading the blog of a guy who seemed happy
to discover a cool “new” function called Zip in LINQ (hey Haskell
programmer over there, stop laughing, you are disrupting my article).
These days following blogs by Microsofties is in fact like witnessing
some sort of Renaissance, with plenty of talk about exciting features
that are clearly borrowed from the functional programming community.

The evolution of C# and Visual Basic, LINQ, and more recently the
inclusion of F# as a fully supported language within the .NET
Framework 4.0, all indicate Microsoft’s new outlook towards functional
programming. F# in particular is essentially OCaml for .NET, and has
been received with open arms by the Microsoft community (as far as I
can tell).

There are very few books by mainstream publishers on OCaml. On the
other hand, F# already has a rich ecosystem of printed books that have
been published by O’Reilly, Apress, Wrox, Manning, and likely in the
near future Microsoft itself. On top of that there are titles devoted
to LINQ and countless books on the recent, more functional oriented,
C# and VB.

I’m not measuring the popularity of programming languages by the
availability of books alone, but it’s clear to me that there are
millions of Joes out there who are ready to learn these new concepts
that are now being put out and promoted by Microsoft. It doesn’t
matter that they’re not new or that they’re borrowed from other
programming languages like Ruby, Python, LISP, ML, Haskell, etcetera.

The end result of Microsoft’s new approach is that now Joes everywhere
are getting exposed to functional programming (masses of people who
would otherwise be virtually shielded from the rest of the programming
world).

Microsoft may no longer be the influential powerhouse it once was, but
I think it is fair to acknowledge the impact it’s currently having on
making functional programming, or at least some degree of it, more
mainstream.

Emidio Bianco says:
June 23, 2010 at 8:44 am

Hi Antonio,

I think that the microsoft’s philosophy about .NET is winning.
I’m a Linux-ian user but the thing that support the programming
innovation is the fast time to develop, bitter lines of code = more
productivities -> more $.
I’m too know more italian guys that they hasn’t used Linux and GTK or
Mono or other framework/languages that C# or VB but they are good
programmer.
The .NET strategy has changed the world of programming and there are,
ever, programmer that don’t knows Linux, design patterns, ecc… nope
the multiplatform compatibility.
I’m with you, on all this.

P.S. Sorry for my bad, bad, bad English
Ti seguo sempre, bel blog.
From: Peter Köhlmann on
RayLopez99 wrote:

> Don't take my word for it, see what this nationally syndicated author
> and computer programming guru says... and note the reader's comment at
> the very end...about Linux...I think he's talking about Linux.

Idiot
--
Microsoft Windows - The art of incompetence.

From: Bert Hyman on
In news:fc120d4d-2a53-4074-8fc1-31ff8f621b4d(a)j4g2000yqh.googlegroups.com
RayLopez99 <raylopez88(a)gmail.com> wrote:

> Anyway the takeaway executive summary of this article is simple: C#
> rulz.

Hardly.

--
Bert Hyman St. Paul, MN bert(a)iphouse.com
From: Steve Thackery on
"RayLopez99" wrote in message
news:fc120d4d-2a53-4074-8fc1-31ff8f621b4d(a)j4g2000yqh.googlegroups.com...

>>
Anyway the takeaway executive summary of this article is simple: C#
rulz.
<<

It doesn't say anything of the sort! The article isn't even about C#. It
says ".Net is introducing functional programming to people who wouldn't
normally explore it". No more, no less.

Probably true; hardly controversial. And nothing to do with C#, except for
the odd mention to set the context.

SteveT