Why I Avoid .NET/Mono
Sunday, February 3rd, 2008EDIT (5 Feb 2008): As indicated in the comments below, some of my reasoning here isn’t completely accurate. Apparently Windows Forms runs under Mono now, albeit not some of the newest stuff. A lot of people seem to be angry at the “Watch your backs, it’s Microsoft and they might sue” thing — I think it’s definitely something to keep in mind if you’re making a living doing Mono development but probably not too much to worry about for anything else.
So, Eddie at Innova has been touting the awesomeness of C# and the Common Language Runtime for a while — how it’s so awesome that he can write code under Mono and run it under Windows using Microsoft’s .NET runtime. And, he can take advantage of all of the .NET libraries! And if C# is the problem (which he explains is a fantastic language) then why not use IronPython or IronRuby or some such?
On the surface, this sounds like the panacea the industry’s been looking for since Sun adopted the “Write Once, Run Anywhere” slogan for Java. Certainly seems enticing — writing in whatever language you want from the set of languages that can compile down to IL, running on any platform that’s got a compatible runtime.
Except I just don’t like it.
