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July 2003 - Posts

Can Mono hold off Parrot?

Miguel thinks that the CLS is ideal for scripting languages, he makes a valid point but attempts to port Perl and Python to the CLS worked, they just sucked. Dan has made the point before that, sure you can port Perl and Python to the CLS but will they really be totally unmanaged. Miguel makes a valid point that a study of the performance problems should be undertaken to get around this.

Wired
14 hours non stop coffee, cola and coding......wired !
12 reasons why Microsoft is a great company to work for

Interesting stuff :)

Phoenix Rising

A framework upon a future version of the CLR will be based as been announced, codenamed Phoenix the project is still at the MSR stage (indeed it only has 2 researchers on at the moment) but with a research program announced its going to grow and grow in research time.

The biggest question of all for me is will the new framework support dynamic AND static languages. If not then Parrot looks all set to dominate. The SDK (or RDK) is not available in beta until Q4 2004 so it looks like I will have to wait until then.

The great Parrot challenge
One of the interesting things to come from OSCON was the talk of the Parrot VM and the Python challenge. The grand daddy of Python, Gudio Van Rossum laid down the challenge and Dan has accepted (and I knew he would :) Interesting that Mono's Miguel De Icaza shared the view that Parrot was based on Religon and this promoted a response from PHP's Sterling Huges and his challenge to the .NET community (I'll write a compiler for PHP in Parrot and we will compare it to a CLR one, if the CLR is so dam hot lets see it not suck compared to Parrot). Interesting stuff but its no secret that the CLR does not handle dynamic languages well, I know of research in MSR to address this issue but surely its something that the Mono, Rotor and Dot GNU folks can work togther on.
Don Box does OSCON

Talking of OSCON Don Box blogs about his time at OSCON and shows why he is da man. At SellsCon IV Don delivered the first chapter on his new book and makes an interesting point.

It brings a lot of the COM and XML thinking around full circle and I'm very anxious to get back to writing.

Anyone here hear that talk? It smells of X# :)

.NET and dynamic languages
Dan blogs about his time at OSCON, his dinner with ".NET folks" and an interesting summary of when dynamic and static languages (Dan considers it an enviroment for Static languages) cross over.
OT: When folk don't understand weblogs

Ever tried to talk to someone about how cool Blogs are only for them to dismiss them, well it happens to me a lot. I often get "why use Blogs when you can use Newsgroups/IRC etc etc" or "the content is not very good". So I have decided to let Blogs speak for them selves, the day will come when they will be big time!!

.NET languages

A very update list of managed compilers including the languages in Mono.

A note on the JANET link I left in Scobles blog:

Nice to see JANET there, the source is shared between Mono and Dot GNU and the link provided is the source for this shared source. The CVS on Mono or Dot GNU are however likely to have more update versions.

Styles and ASP.NET controls
Maybe someone knows this? When you create a ASP.NET form and drag a few components onto it you can then setup styles for each component. When you have say 10 things to change per element and a form with 20 elements then its a real ball ache. What would be nice is a HTML style CSS sheet so you can block style a component. Now this could be done by creating custom components but it would so nice if this was available out of the box.
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