Re: Checking for Modification to a Set of Files

On Mon, 27 Mar 2006 07:29:22 +0000, Randy Howard wrote:

Ben Bacarisse wrote
(in article <pan.2006.03.26.04.35.14.277042@xxxxxxxxx>):

On Sat, 25 Mar 2006 19:47:05 +0000, Randy Howard wrote:

Ben Bacarisse wrote
(in article <pan.2006.03.25.18.36.08.510189@xxxxxxxxx>):

I was not suggesting you were partisan about platforms. You seemed to
be, like me, partisan about camelCasedAPIsFromRedmond and this was
obscuring the fact that .NET applications are not Windows-only.

I've yet to encounter or hear anyone claim that they actually use .NET
on anything other than Windows for production use.

Hmm... I am not sure what answer you are reserving by using the word
"production". The mono team lists various uses that look, to me, like
production applications, but I may have missed your point.

What I mean is I have not heard of a single application running in the
wild for anyone other than the developers using the .NET platform for
anything but a Windows system. When there is a non-zero collection of
applications for mono that run on multiple platforms, then it will be more
than a pipe dream.

Ah, production cross-platform applications of mono. I certainly don't
know of any and as I am not interested in researching the topic, I am
quite happy to leave it there.

<general agreement about MS's suspicious standardisation snipped>

Looking at the "homework questions" of recent years, that trend is
getting continually worse, or entrance criteria for CS programs is
bottoming out, or both.

This is called getting older. Every generation thinks this, in every
subject area. Of course, in some generations and in some subjects it
might actually be true, but the perception of it follows inevitably
from gaining experience: "how could anyone not understand that?".

I hear you, but I'm talking about some pretty extreme cases here. I'm
not wondering why entering freshmen don't immediately get pointer
indirections. I see questions like "what is the purpose of the 'if'
conditional?" and "what is a for loop?".

I have no recent experience of "entering freshmen" (I'd call them first
year undergraduates I think) but the last time I did, one had to assume
that they may have no knowledge whatsoever, since schools (your high
schools) were not teaching any sort of programming. I don't know if this
had changed here in the UK but it was, to some extent, an advantage
because pre-university programming experience often had to be un-taught.

Anyway, I would be more worried by the standard of the output rather than
the knowledge of the intake.

<snip>
Indeed. You get to decide if it suits your needs based on some facts
about it. Is that not a better situation to be in than assuming it is
Windows only?

Not really.

OK :)

If there are no applications for Technology X outside of its
original "native" platform, yet it is technically possible to produce
them (due to claims of portability) after several years of availability
as a development platform, then pretending like those other platforms
are a viable tool is probably fooling yourself. Sun put Java out there,
and it did not take years for Java apps to show up outside of a Solaris
box. Of course, Sun actually *was* interested in fostering it
off-platform, the exact opposite situation that Microsoft has been
producing. With results that are similarly inverted.

You will get no argument from me about that. I don't want to push .NET --
I hardly even know what it was until this thread (I just happened to know
I have mono apps running on my Gnome desktop). I imagine that as the .NET
hype grows, more and more manageroids will tell their teams: "Do it in
CLI/C#. It is standard and available for lots of platforms". Presumably
we will soon learn technical reasons for that being a bad choice.

--
Ben.
.