Greenspun on .NET

Philip Greenspun responded to a request for information about what technology to learn. His response was Microsoft .NET. After a bit of push back from Dave Winer, he qualified that he is a very big fan of the unification of languages allowed by .NET. I disagreed with his assessment of Java, however. My response follows…

In general, I believe the Intermediate Language, Common Language Runtime and “automatic” support for SOAP in .NET are good things, and I hope that Microsoft does not get patents that allow them to control those areas. In that, I am in agreement with Philip’s comments above.

However, regarding Java, I disagree with this statement:

The competition is Java, Java, Java, an environment in which it is impossible to provide a scripting language alternative for some or all of a system’s programmers.

There are many scripting choices for Java. Take a look at this list of Java VM languages. IBM’s Bean Scripting Framework even makes it possible to write a single Java component that is scriptable in the user’s langauge of choice.

I’ve used Jython quite a bit, and it’s great. It works almost completely like standard Python, but allows me to work directly with Java objects.

The technology to do what .NET promises has been available for some time… but Microsoft is the first to bundle it all up and market it in one concerted effort. And marketing is something Microsoft is very good at.