undefined | Better HN

0 pointsseanmcdirmid11y ago0 comments

I'm feeling a little defensive here (disclaimer, MS employee, but I work for MSR, not devdiv):

> Not sure what you mean: MS has a history of abandoning its developer platforms and frameworks that thier developers have invested in, so much so that there's no longer a clear UI story for building native desktop windows apps, i.e. VB6, Silverlight, WinForms and WPF are all effectively deprecated.

WPF is still chugging a long strongly even if there aren't so many new features. Visual Studio was recently rewritten in it, and its a very good design with lots of room for encoding desktop apps in the future. I use it daily and cringe at the thought of ever doing something for the web without it.

> Whilst VisualStudio is a great IDE, I find it a subpar experience without R#.

I use visual studio just fine without R#. I see no point these days writing code without an IDE, I'm addicted to code completion. Not to mention amazing things are being done with Roslyn.

> By contrast, C#'s configuration model, msbuild project format, heavy frameworks and tooling makes it unfeasible to develop without an IDE.

C# is totally usable from the command line, most developers just refer the IDE.

> he worlds best VM engineers work on the Dart VM, i.e. the same pedigree responsible for the StrongTalk VM that was later acquired by Sun to form the basis of the world-class Java Hotspot VM that later went on to develop V8, are now leading the development on the Dart VM.

The CLR is one of the best VMs ever (read: very fast), worked on by some of the brightest who are very comparable to the Animorphic crowd. The DLR feature (ability to generate/compile expression trees at run-time) is also very cool and missing from the JVM. If you are into building language run-times, it is an awesome base for a dynamic language.

True: it is only available on Windows, but Mono has made progress as well (most features available sans WPF). I've been thinking about porting my language work [1] over to mono.cairo to see if I can achieve cross platform without going to Java or the web.

[1] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/smcdirm/liveprogr...

0 comments

mythz11y ago

> WPF is still chugging a long strongly

Your definition of strong sounds different to other peoples. There was entire FixWPF grass roots campaign to petition more investment into WPF, twitter account is at: https://twitter.com/fixwpf they also had a website and blog pleading for MS to keep investing in WPF and fix its issues.

When and what was the most recent feature added to WPF?

> I see no point these days writing code without an IDE

You may not, but most popular languages can be developed without and IDE, which is important for simplicity / deployment / portability. It's also much easier to develop in smaller laptops which can maximize real-estate. Obviously a language that is suitable without an IDE is also more suitable in an online IDE, which we're seeing with the new online IDEs becoming available.

> C# is totally usable from the command line, most developers just refer the IDE.

So it's only usable where it's worst than most other languages at? i.e. Scripts and Command-line apps? It's so totally usable that MS invented a new completely different language for creating command-line scripts (PowerShell).

As you likely already know, most .NET developers don't spend their time developing 1 file Console apps. Any task that has any meaningful user-share requires an IDE.

> The CLR is one of the best VMs ever

Citation needed, it's not as performant as the JVM, and its lack of cross-platform is a major limitation. The Sudoku benchmarks shows that it's slower (and more verbose) than Dart even removing time spent on pre-compilation. Dart also offers high-level productivity features like variable-sized integers, saving a lot of boilerplate from having to deal with specific fixed-size integers.

> awesome base for a dynamic language.

Really? All dynamic languages targetting both the CLR/JVM are either deprecated or second-class citizens on the CLR and are always better supported on the JVM: Jython/IronPython JRuby/IronRuby Clojure/ClojureCLR. The CLR is a wasteland of unpolished efforts with relatively no traction/community behind them.

The DLR team has actually been disbanded with the primary developer behind it (Jim Hugunin / IronPython) having left Microsoft (http://hugunin.net/microsoft_farewell.html) to now work at Google on the Dart project no less.

What he had to say about Dart (http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/11/dart-roundup-frog):

    I've spent most of my career trying to end the battles between the dynamic 
    and static worlds and instead bring them together so that each side can 
    enjoy the benefits of the other. Writing this compiler in dart is the 
    first time that I've really felt the effortless blend of these worlds that 
    I've been seeking.

    Dart is the first time that I have been able to start off writing code in 
    a very dynamic fashion and incrementally add static checks as designs become 
    solid or complexity warrants the effort.

Dynamic itself is a heavyweight solution and may many suggest may have been a mistake, C# 6.0 is actually introducing new '$' syntax to avoid dynamic and make working with dictionaries better.

seanmcdirmidOP11y ago

> Your definition of strong sounds different to other peoples. There was entire FixWPF grass roots campaign to petition more investment into WPF, twitter account is at: https://twitter.com/fixwpf they also had a website and blog pleading for MS to keep investing in WPF and fix its issues.

WPF still works very well, it is not broken. It is still one of the best UI toolkits ever constructed with a lot of flexibility that I don't think is still appreciated enough.

> When and what was the most recent feature added to WPF?

No clue. I'm as curious as everyone else.

> You may not, but most popular languages can be developed without and IDE, which is important for simplicity / deployment / portability.

As far as I'm concerned, the IDE is a part of the language and at the very least the programming experience. People programming in emacs and VIM will eventually retire, the future is undeniable at this point. A language designed for an IDE will work better in an IDE than a language that is designed for least common dominator development environments. But then I'm biased since that is part of my research.

And also, Dart is so far very weak on the IDE side. I wonder if the Dart team has lots of compiler people and not a lot of IDE people, or if they have the same old-fashioned mindset as you in de-emphasizing the value of a good IDE experience. But I would expect it to get better, they hired Luke Church after all.

> It's so totally usable that MS invented a new completely different language written for creating command-line scripts (PowerShell).

PowerShell is an optional tool, not required. I've seen huge C# projects build from a CMD prompt (not that I want to bother with build configuration management myself).

> Citation needed, it's not as performant as the JVM

Citation needed, in my experience, C# kicks the JVM's butt in Win performance. Reified generics also reduce lots of boxing issues.

> The Sudoku benchmarks shows that it's slower (and more verbose) than Dart

Your numbers are completely whack. First, it shows mono being faster than the CLR, oh and you are using a virtual machine on top of that. Do you really think people will take that seriously? Also, do you ever try..you know..a multi-threaded shared memory solution?

> The DLR team has actually been disbanded with the primary developer behind it (Jim Hugunin / IronPython) having left Microsoft (http://hugunin.net/microsoft_farewell.html) to now work at Google on the Dart project no less.

Jim and Jon are gone, but the work they did is totally still around and works wonderfully. I use it, its fast, and it puts C# on par or beyond with any dynamic language that supports dynamic eval.

> Dynamic itself is a heavyweight solution and may many suggest may have been a mistake, C# 6.0 is actually introducing new '$' syntax to avoid dynamic and make working with dictionaries better.

I'm not talking about C#'s dynamic language feature, which I don't really care for, but dynamic expression tree compilation that came along with the rest of the DLR. As a language implementer, it is very useful.

mythz11y ago

> WPF still works very well, it is not broken. It is still one of the best UI toolkits ever constructed

What exactly do you think the FixWPF campaign was about? And what else have you used? If it's so good, why are so few Windows desktop apps that come with Windows written with it? At least Apple uses Cocoa for all its OSX Desktop apps which I find to be of much higher quality and has smoother performance.

> People programming in emacs and VIM will eventually retire, the future is undeniable at this point.

You're making it sound most developers using text editors are old kooks with 1-foot into retirement. How disconnected are you? What % of OSS projects on GitHub do you think use an IDE? More or less than 50%? https://github.com/trending

> Dart is so far very weak on the IDE side. I wonder if the Dart team has lots of compiler people and not a lot of IDE people,

They actually have quite a few IDE people on the team with many years of experience developing IDE tooling. Any immaturity is simply that the DartEditor is still so young. It was only recently that they rewrote the old Analyzer that was previously written in Java to Dart, which now runs much faster. No doubt VS benefits from a large experienced IDE team as would JetBrains.

> I've seen huge C# projects build from a CMD prompt

Seeing something done once doesn't extrapolate itself into a common use-case or a well-supported story, which it isn't. Having to maintain your own build scripts is a slow, painful and mundane experience which is why it's a rarely considered approach. Even the just released Swift has a better command-line story than C#, which supports #! scripts, a command-line REPL and LLVM debugger.

> Citation needed, in my experience, C# kicks the JVM's butt in Win performance.

Citation is still needed. Where can this butt kicking be seen?

> Your numbers are completely whack. First, it shows mono being faster than the CLR, oh and you are using a virtual machine on top of that.

They're not my numbers, that's the actual output from the command-line Console apps which you can see on the project page. But don't take my iMac's word for it, all the source code is there, run the benchmarks yourself. Your 2 points aren't exclusive, there is no "on top of that" they were all run from my iMac, I would've run C#/.NET natively, but y'know that's hard to do when it's the only platform that doesn't work cross-platform. Running inside Parallels likely accounts for about 10-15% performance overhead, it doesn't explain 2.3x worst performance.

> As a language implementer, it is very useful.

Language VM features that are optimal for compiler writers doesn't translate itself into killer general-purpose language features for everyone else.

2 more replies

curtis1711y ago

WinRT was not built on the CLR. MS didn't eat it's own dogfood. Divided story between Windows Phone and Windows 8.

MS should open source the CLR. Also, the new MRT - minimal native runtime.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 comments

mythz11y ago

> WPF is still chugging a long strongly

When and what was the most recent feature added to WPF?

> I see no point these days writing code without an IDE

> C# is totally usable from the command line, most developers just refer the IDE.

As you likely already know, most .NET developers don't spend their time developing 1 file Console apps. Any task that has any meaningful user-share requires an IDE.

> The CLR is one of the best VMs ever

> awesome base for a dynamic language.

What he had to say about Dart (http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/11/dart-roundup-frog):

    I've spent most of my career trying to end the battles between the dynamic 
    and static worlds and instead bring them together so that each side can 
    enjoy the benefits of the other. Writing this compiler in dart is the 
    first time that I've really felt the effortless blend of these worlds that 
    I've been seeking.

    Dart is the first time that I have been able to start off writing code in 
    a very dynamic fashion and incrementally add static checks as designs become 
    solid or complexity warrants the effort.

Dynamic itself is a heavyweight solution and may many suggest may have been a mistake, C# 6.0 is actually introducing new '$' syntax to avoid dynamic and make working with dictionaries better.

seanmcdirmidOP11y ago

WPF still works very well, it is not broken. It is still one of the best UI toolkits ever constructed with a lot of flexibility that I don't think is still appreciated enough.

> When and what was the most recent feature added to WPF?

No clue. I'm as curious as everyone else.

> You may not, but most popular languages can be developed without and IDE, which is important for simplicity / deployment / portability.

> It's so totally usable that MS invented a new completely different language written for creating command-line scripts (PowerShell).

PowerShell is an optional tool, not required. I've seen huge C# projects build from a CMD prompt (not that I want to bother with build configuration management myself).

> Citation needed, it's not as performant as the JVM

Citation needed, in my experience, C# kicks the JVM's butt in Win performance. Reified generics also reduce lots of boxing issues.

> The Sudoku benchmarks shows that it's slower (and more verbose) than Dart

Jim and Jon are gone, but the work they did is totally still around and works wonderfully. I use it, its fast, and it puts C# on par or beyond with any dynamic language that supports dynamic eval.

> Dynamic itself is a heavyweight solution and may many suggest may have been a mistake, C# 6.0 is actually introducing new '$' syntax to avoid dynamic and make working with dictionaries better.

mythz11y ago

> WPF still works very well, it is not broken. It is still one of the best UI toolkits ever constructed

> People programming in emacs and VIM will eventually retire, the future is undeniable at this point.

> Dart is so far very weak on the IDE side. I wonder if the Dart team has lots of compiler people and not a lot of IDE people,

> I've seen huge C# projects build from a CMD prompt

> Citation needed, in my experience, C# kicks the JVM's butt in Win performance.

Citation is still needed. Where can this butt kicking be seen?

> Your numbers are completely whack. First, it shows mono being faster than the CLR, oh and you are using a virtual machine on top of that.

> As a language implementer, it is very useful.

Language VM features that are optimal for compiler writers doesn't translate itself into killer general-purpose language features for everyone else.

2 more replies

curtis1711y ago

WinRT was not built on the CLR. MS didn't eat it's own dogfood. Divided story between Windows Phone and Windows 8.

MS should open source the CLR. Also, the new MRT - minimal native runtime.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse