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From the Editors: Don't expect Microsoft to let Mono dictate


By SD Times News Team
November 1, 2008 — 
The true test of a specification’s openness is whether the company that sponsored the specification accepts third-party additions or changes. Microsoft submitted its Common Language Infrastructure to Ecma, a vendor consortium, on the basis that it was an open, non-proprietary specification. The Mono project’s desire to contribute back to the specification will test Microsoft’s earnestness. We don’t predict that Microsoft will pass the test, but rather will squelch Mono’s changes.

From Day 1, of course, Microsoft has been in the driver’s seat regarding the CLI and everything related to .NET. That is unlikely to change.

In its efforts to replicate .NET 2.0, Mono thought up some interesting additions to the specification. That’s good. An open specification should be dynamic and encourage broad participation. It shouldn’t just be a pro-forma rubber stamp for one company’s proprietary technology.

While Mono is free to submit its ideas to Ecma, Microsoft remains incredibly powerful when it comes to CLI. The Ecma CLI working group must decide whether the additions are worthwhile, and Microsoft serves effectively as a gatekeeper. It can use the documented processes with Ecma to slow down any additions that it doesn’t want. Even if, by some fluke, Ecma does approve some of Mono’s changes to the CLI, Microsoft can simply delay implementing them in its own code, or ignore them completely.

It took the Mono team several years to develop Mono 2.0. The pace of the open-source project’s work, and its relatively small installed base, is too underwhelming to threaten Microsoft’s designs over .NET. Microsoft is also cycling its energy toward the creation of .NET libraries such as LINQ, WCF and WPF, which Mono will be attempting to replicate in upcoming releases.

Note that the .NET Framework has remained largely unaltered since the release of .NET 2.0, which means that Microsoft and Mono are using the same playbook. Despite Ecma, Mono has to scramble to stay on the same page. Because Mono has to ensure that it not only conforms to Ecma specifications, but also passes Microsoft’s test suites, it is all but guaranteed that Mono—and anyone else seeking to create a CLI implementation—must follow Microsoft’s lead.

Do not expect the CLI to evolve much any time soon, except where Microsoft intends to take it. In the end, the Ecma specification is just a rubber stamp.

Python slithers toward maturity
When Python appeared in 1991, it was hailed as a legible language. With all its white space, it forced developers to write applications that could be read through like a book. The scripting language was a big break with a world that was also just discovering the hard-to-read Perl and TCL. But Python trucked along, gathering a following, and eventually becoming one of the P's in the LAMP stack.

After 17 years of evolution, Python is preparing to shed its skin of hacks. Python 3.0 is such a large step forward that it's essentially a whole new language, and it represents a significant break with the past. Python's standard library sheds thousands of lines of code, which can break applications that relied upon now-deprecated functions.

As with any programming language, the easiest, most efficient way to do things has evolved over time as well. The old way of interacting with an FTP server, or of sending messages to queues, has likely seen a number of revisions, meaning that today's Python 2.x developers can choose between a handful of options for almost any scenario, and they likely have their favorite approaches.

Many of those approaches are gone in Python 3.0, which disposes of many of the hacks that filled out functionality in the Python 2.x era. From what we've seen so far, Python 3.0 will be a big step ahead and may anger the faithful, but in the long run, it's a change that all Python developers knew was needed


Related Search Term(s): Ecma, Microsoft, Mono, Python


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