RPoet's Journal: Excellent PJ article, and Mono

PJ has another excellent article over at Groklaw, summarizing why Free software "wins" and why proprietary is bad. Preaching to the choir, sure, but PJ's writing style is just a breath of fresh air, very engaging. And perhaps more optimistic than I, which is why I find her writings reassuring.

Meanwhile, I'm spending Easter playing with Mono, Ximian's free .Net/C# implementation. I am wary about potential IP issues, but with Microsoft's "RAND+Royalty Free" licensing and ECMA standardization, it just feels safe. And unlike SUN's Java, which I've been using, Mono is free. There's one cognitive dissonance off my shoulders! And as a language, C# is way nicer than Java. It draws more on C/C++ than Java; It has enums, structs, operator overloading, and classes that are not filename oriented as in Java. And where Java's class libraries are over-engineered and full of deprecated legacy, the .Net libraries learned from this and is clean and logical from the get-go. Generics support are already implemented as a prototype in Mono too. I'm currently writing a little project in C#, which I will not speak of yet.