Re: What about Embedded?

[Who <mailforwho googlemail com>]

On 7/20/06, David Nielsen <david lovesunix net> wrote:
> tor, 20 07 2006 kl. 23:24 +0100, skrev Jamie McCracken:
>
> > The D language offers the best of all worlds IMO *without* compromising
> > on speed, resource usage or bloat. It would be madness to use a VM instead!
> >
> > (of course its not as integrated into Gnome yet and lacks an IDE but if
> > someone puts the work in you will have a killer platform than no VM
> > based platform can match)
>
> ... in about 10 years, once D exits beta and someone sits down to write
> a proper IDE, the bindings, etc.. Mono is here now, it has basically all
> the tools we want, the Mono maintainers care about GNOME and as an added
> bonus we get to market GNOME to all the college students who are
> currently being trained with .NET in mind.

I think this is a good point.

I have just spent my gap year developing a C# app for Windows, not
because I wanted to use that platform but because that was what my
employer specified. It was ridiculously easy to learn (because of the
number of help/tutorials/examples around), and the development speed
was incredible.

I'm sure this will be the situation for a huge number of young people.
As far as I have experienced this year, Microsoft are very good at
catching programmers when they are young, giving them very powerful
tools that make life very easy, and that they _feel_ they can not do
without (I think many people in the community are experienced working
without any high level tools, and now find them useful but not
essential, whereas increasingly young people are being taught to
program with these advanced functions, practically unaware of what to
do if they are not available). If you are only developing desktop
applications for relatively high end systems (as these people
generally are) I think it is fair to say that there are few compelling
reasons to learn lower level languages.

I reckon C# can act as a bridge that allows people to use what they
know already (and the knowledge of a large pool of Windows and Linux
programmers)  to learn about (some aspects of) programming for Gnome,
perhaps learning to write more efficient/low level code later on. The
important thing is that they are programming _for gnome_

Embracing these people is a great way to get more developers, fresh
ideas and new and diverse applications.

Who