Microsoft's C# (Sharp) & .NET -- A Heads Up

[Daniel Berlin]

"Mark Hammond" <MarkH at ActiveState.com> writes:

> "Cees de Groot" <cg at gaia.cdg.acriter.nl> wrote in message
> news:8ln84n$380$1 at gaia.cdg.acriter.nl...
> 
> > ...and is soooo innovative that it does exactly the same thing as Java
> > and the JVM, only five years later and at the vaporware stage.
> 
> vaporware == beta distributed to thousands of people?  Since when?
> Anyway...
> 
> I think you should wait for the jury on this one.  There are alot of
> academics who have ported their languages to both the JVM and the .NET
> runtime.

I'm sure MS rewarded them, or their schools,  handsomely.
> 
> It is safe to say that no one I have met with experience in both these
> technologies shares your opinion.
> 
> People obviously _do_ share some general concerns about MS, but if you
> limit yourself to a discussion on the technical merits of these
> technologies, you wont find many people on your side of the debate.
> 
> Watching the reactions of the dyed-in-the-wool-MS-hating-academics was
> almost the most interesting part of this project.  Suffice it to say they
> started the project with their "Tux" t-shirts being worn proudly every
> (single, smelly :-) day, but by the time the PDC came around they were
> first in the queue for their .NET tshirts ;-)


This is what MS is very good at.
How do I know?

I worked for 3 years as part of Microsoft Research, among other
places,  in the student consultant group.
This was our job.
Us being the students at the 50 most respected CS schools (It's now
been expanded to be *much* larger).
Promote MS within our respective schools through any means possible.
This means MS would do everything, including giving multi-million
dollar grants and computer labs to schools, to convince CS professors,
and CS departments, to use MS software, in particular, the development
tools. You name it, we did it, to convince people it was good, and to
use it.
We were, and from what I understand, they still are, very successful.

However, working at MS gave me some perspective.
There are certain things you have to understand.

1. MS never has, and never will, do anything for the
customer. Regardless of what you think, the only reason they've ever
done anything is for themselves. It's only later that it might turn
out to be good for the customer. Witness Active Directory (really
created because MS had too many computers and users, and thus ran into
the limits of NT 4's model, and couldn't create new users and computer
accounts in the MICROSOFT domain), among a billion other examples.
If you think they did something for the customer, their was an
alterior motive. Trust me.

2. The answer to the question "How do you expect to enter a
marketplace, and become the leader, with a product half as good as
what is already out there?" is "We're Microsoft" (I'm not kidding
either, that was the answer I was given when I asked the question.)

3. MS has very smart people working for them, though not as many as
they used to (quite a lot have left, and are still leaving).  The
cause of most of the above problems is that middle management at MS,
like everywhere else, is  idiotic. If the smart people still ran the
company, and half of them  weren't amazingly arrogant, MS might be a
much nicer company.


I used to be exactly like you are now. Defending MS, but not an MS
lackey, trying to give them the benefit of the doubt. The more I
worked there, and saw how things were, the less I could do this, until
I just couldn't take the bullshit anymore and quit.




> 
> > (http://grunge.cs.tu-berlin.de/~tolk/vmlanguages.html, support /that/
> many
> > stuff on your little VM, M$).
> 
> I am sure they will, and I am sure the majority of language implementors
> will agree it is an improvement (again, if viewed purely from technical
> grounds)
> 
> > ... happily going back to Java, Python, SmallTalk, Scheme, XML and
> whatnot
> 
> Not sure what point you are trying to make here?  These, plus others, are
> also on .NET.  You should have listed languages that people have heard of,
> and are not announced for .NET.  Maybe you had the "TRS-80 Model 1 BASIC
> Interpreter" implementation in mind?
> 
> Mark.
> 

--Dan