Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

 

I want Mono for KISSing

Heh, heh, try that on your precise, unambiguous Semantic Web, pard

Mono Development Platform Moves into Beta.  Picking up on an older item as I add a news feed to my subscriptions, I am reminded that I am fascinated about Mono.  I don't have any sensibility about Novell now supporting the effort as part of its Ximian acquisition, but I can see that there is serious momentum.  I don't even have too much concern about C# 2.0 being developed at Microsoft while Mono is targeted against the current ECMA Specifications for the CLR and C# and other standards-based goodies.

What is it that intrigues me?  I think it is the ability to travel, and travel light.  While Visual Studio, Eclipse, Sun One, and other GUI-based, graphically-oriented development platforms are climbing into the bloatsphere, there is a chance to maintain some simplicity without having to buy into someone else's idea of hiding complexity.  I think it is something Peter Coffee is saying about developer discipline.  Not only must developers strive to keep things simple in providing a computing experience, the developer's platform or framework should reflect the same perspective.

I still don't know that I've captured my visceral affinity for Mono.  I may also find that it is misplaced.  This may be the real concern: I think the way we build up components in current Object-Oriented Technologies (C++, Java, C#, etc.) is too messy.  I think that the intensification of design- and coding-time layering to somehow hiding the mess is a heavyweight solution that leaves way too much swept under the rug.  I am not certain this trip is necessary.  Granted that this has to do with my comfort level around managing (that is, isolating and limiting) complexity, I want to get to a lightweight place where I can see how the framework works and also see how to master the overall delivery process without overlays that obscure the integrity of the delivery of a confirmed configurable element (e.g., an installable program or a reusable component).

I get to work this out in the coming months with some toolcraft projects I have in mind.  Meanwhile, you can calibrate my perspective by my telling you that when I finally dug into Java this time last year, I used just the J2SE SDK, with 4NT and jEdit as my "development platform." And I am still puzzling out how to work the package metaphor from initial experimental trials all the way to delivered code with JavaDocs.  I will happily work through the same with Mono.
posted by Dennis at 5/12/2004 05:01:43 PM