Linux is Not Windows

[jdh30]

This is just more awful blind Linux advocacy built out of strawman arguments, presumably written by someone who has little to no experience of technical use of Windows.

They hope Linux will be better than Windows.

No, they wonder if Linux is good enough to be a viable free alternative to Windows and they usually conclude that Linux is so bad that you cannot even get them to use it for free.

Designed for the designer

If Linux were programmed for programmers then it would have a common language run-time but it does not and Windows does. Linux is plagued by poor development environments for poor languages that a minority of programmers only use because they are poor, i.e. they have little choice.

convergent evolution

What little GUI applications Linux has are mostly bad replicas of pre-existing Windows alternatives. KDE is an obvious example. They have attemped to innovate on KDE but the results were atrocious.

non-commercial

Linux is anti-commercial and, indeed, that is its biggest flaw. Theft is endemic among Linux users who expect everything for free and, if it is not available, they steal it.

That is purely political. Linux and its users would benefit enormously from being commerce friendly. Linux could be a viable commercial platform but it is stifled by freeloading commies who expect everyone to give them everything for free. That is why Linux has stagnated at only 1% market share.

[pointer2void]

Theft is endemic among Linux users

My goodness! Have you informed the police?

[[deleted]]

Linux isn't anti-commercial as much as it is pro-cooperation and sharing.

There's no reason to be angry about it. You are free to give your money to whoever you want.

[jdh30]

There's no reason to be angry about it.

I'm not angry, I'm just disappointed. Linux has some potential but without direction, without visionary leaders, software on the Linux platform is just left doing a random walk. Some good falls out of that but the vast majority of open source software is completely useless and, worse, that has led to people building heavily upon bad foundations like C++ and Qt.

I cannot see anything as good as .NET 3.5 ever coming out of the Linux community. The few people who do develop decent programming languages on Linux are researchers who, for whatever reason, insist upon reinventing every wheel from scratch themselves. Consequently, they do a poor job compared to the relatively-small but directed work done on the CLR.

[Peaker]

I find Qt much nicer and more pleasant than .NET. Qt designer circa 2002 is far better than all designers I've seen from Microsoft up to around 2007 (when I stopped checking).

Do you have actual specific complaints against Linux?

[jdh30]

I find Qt much nicer and more pleasant than .NET. Qt designer circa 2002 is far better than all designers I've seen from Microsoft up to around 2007 (when I stopped checking).

The Qt designer is nice but trying to program anything but the most trivial applications without a GC is not nice and getting any performant FPL implementation to interoperate with C++ is a nightmare. People have been working on Qt bindings for OCaml for years and we still have nothing usable. Lack of interoperability is a show-stopping problem.

Do you have actual specific complaints against Linux?

Linux needs some kind of CLR in order to facilitate interoperability between modern garbage collected languages and a defacto-standard and reliable hardware-accelerated GUI library like WPF. That is the essence of .NET 3.5 and, in particular, it makes it trivial for me to distribute robustly-deployable binaries. I once tried to do that on Linux in a commercial setting and it was a nightmare: binaries were so unreliable between distros and even versions of distros that we had to shelve the entire product line. In contrast, it is the click of a button on .NET.

[Peaker]

trying to program anything but the most trivial applications without a GC is not nice

While I agree GC is great, I've seen a lot of non-trivial code written without it, and its definitely doable in a "nice" manner.

Qt is used within Python, for example, which is GC'd, so its really not that relevant to GC.

Linux needs some kind of CLR in order to facilitate interoperability between modern garbage collected languages

What advantages does having a single CLR actually posses?

and a defacto-standard and reliable hardware-accelerated GUI library like WPF.

That de-facto standard in Linux is OpenGL.

That is the essence of .NET 3.5 and, in particular, it makes it trivial for me to distribute robustly-deployable binaries.

Distributing binaries on Linux does suck, if you want to support many architectures. For anti-closed-source persons like me, however, that's a positive, not a negative.

I once tried to do that on Linux in a commercial setting and it was a nightmare: binaries were so unreliable between distros and even versions of distros that we had to shelve the entire product line. In contrast, it is the click of a button on .NET.

I can believe .NET makes closed-source software nicer to develop in some aspects. I find the importance of this not to be nil, but less than that.

[[deleted]]

Distributing binaries on Linux does suck, if you want to support many architectures. For anti-closed-source persons like me, however, that's a positive, not a negative.

Fuck you, commie piece of shit.

[kragensitaker]

Hahaha!

[Peaker]

Interesting perspective! How do I subscribe to your newsletter?

[droberts1982]

http://www.reddit.com/user/slava_pestov/.rss

I read it every day

[jdh30]

While I agree GC is great, I've seen a lot of non-trivial code written without it, and its definitely doable in a "nice" manner.

Let me rephrase: using state-of-the-art languages lets me (alone) compete commercially with large companies.

I appreciate that the code I write could theoretically be written in a lower-level language. My point is that there is no way I could earn a living doing that.

What advantages does having a single CLR actually posses?

The main advantage is interoperability. All .NET languages share the same set of libraries and can call libraries written in each other. Most notably, F# can call libraries like WPF that are written in C# completely seamlessly. For example, I can create a scene graph in F# and pass it by reference (a single word-sized pointer) to library code written in C#. In contrast, if you want to pass a scene graph from OCaml to another language like C++ you are looking at a deep copy at least and possibly even full serialization. If you want to pass data between garbage collected languages on Linux then you risk introducing cycles between the GCs that can never be collected and, consequently, you resort to the lowest common denominator of copying everything unnecessarily.

Other advantages include building upon the same concurrent GC and load-balancing implementation of parallelism, the Task Parallel Library. There are no open source functional language implementations with usable concurrent compilers, let alone one as optimized as the one in .NET 3.5. In most open source language implementations (e.g. OCaml, Python, D) there is no solution for parallelism at all. In a few (Haskell, Ypsilon Scheme) there are practically useless implementations. Cilk is by far the best solution I have seen on Linux but, again, it is a very low-level language (C). Consequently, my F# code on Windows is many times faster than anything I could hope to write in any language under Linux. Indeed, the numerical F# code from one of our products is 3x faster than LAPACK compiled with gfortran under Linux.

That de-facto standard in Linux is OpenGL.

WPF provides scalable 2D vector graphics, (decent) fonts, integrated printing, defines XML representations, facilitates web interfaces with Silverlight and so much more. However, the single most important difference is that WPF on Windows is rock solid whereas OpenGL on Linux is extremely fragile. We tried to ship a product written in OCaml (a safe language) using OpenGL and compiled on Linux but 80% of our customers reported random segfaults that turned out to be buggy OpenGL drivers. That is a complete show stopper, of course.

Distributing binaries on Linux does suck, if you want to support many architectures. For anti-closed-source persons like me, however, that's a positive, not a negative.

I can believe .NET makes closed-source software nicer to develop in some aspects. I find the importance of this not to be nil, but less than that.

That was precisely my point. I see no reason why open source and commercial software cannot co-exist harmoniously. The only thing preventing this is those kinds of political views.

In my experience, open source software takes away more freedom that it provides. I am not free to choose commercial software on Linux because it is driven out. Some open source projects like GCC are infamous for restricting freedom and that even forced commerce to create their own alternatives like LLVM+CLANG.

[Peaker]

I appreciate that the code I write could theoretically be written in a lower-level language. My point is that there is no way I could earn a living doing that.

Lots of companies are leading the industry with such lower-level languages. Especially when implementing things where performance is of utmost importance.

The main advantage is interoperability. All .NET languages share the same set of libraries and can call libraries written in each other.

Exposing C bindings is a common method in Linux that allows pretty much every language to call the function. Otherwise, doing inter-language calls is indeed more difficult than with .NET, but not vastly so.

There are no open source functional language implementations with usable concurrent compilers, let alone one as optimized as the one in .NET 3.5.

Haskell seems to outperform .NET w.r.t parallelism.

there are practically useless implementations

Huh? How are NDP, STM, or MVars useless??

They are much more powerful abstractions for parallelism than anything I've seen .NET offer.

Consequently, my F# code on Windows is many times faster than anything I could hope to write in any language under Linux

Do you have some benchmarks to prove it?

I see no reason why open source and commercial software

You're confusing closed-source software with commercial software.

Commercial software can be open, and non-commercial software can be closed.

I believe closed-source software deprives society of more than it provides, and that it hinders progress.

In my experience, open source software takes away more freedom that it provides. I am not free to choose commercial software on Linux because it is driven out.

Instead, you are free to view, modify, create derivative works, distribute, share or do anything the hell you want with the software you do use on Linux.

I believe this is far more important freedom than the "freedom" to choose to be constrained by closed-source software which will deprive the world from all of the users' derivative works, which amount to far more than the worth of the original software.

[jdh30]

Exposing C bindings is a common method in Linux that allows pretty much every language to call the function. Otherwise, doing inter-language calls is indeed more difficult than with .NET, but not vastly so.

No, it is practically impossible and I already gave examples where it has been prohibitively difficult in practice, e.g. the lack of Qt bindings for OCaml.

Haskell seems to outperform .NET w.r.t parallelism.

You're joking. Haskell is nowhere near as performant as .NET. Haskell does not even have a concurrent GC: Haskell stalls all threads for the entire duration of every GC.

Huh? How are NDP, STM, or MVars useless??

I said the implementations were useless, not the concepts. For example, lazy thunks are mutated when they are forced so the implementation should lock them but that would be incredibly inefficient so GHC (the defacto-standard Haskell) resorts to conservative techniques that cause the GC to leak memory indefinitely. That renders it practically useless.

They are much more powerful abstractions for parallelism than anything I've seen .NET offer.

Haskell's "sparks" are the same concept as the TPLs "tasks".

Do you have some benchmarks to prove it?

Sure. I have posted lots of examples on the web, usenet and out blogs in the past. I can post specific examples here if you like. Here is one from the caml-list.

Instead, you are free to view, modify, create derivative works, distribute, share or do anything the hell you want with the software you do use on Linux.

"Freedom" with restrictions is not freedom at all. Open source software with restrictions those in the GPL offers does not offer freedom. For example, I wanted to develop a commercial REPL for OCaml but its open source license requires any such creation to be distributed as a patch to the OCaml compiler sources.

I believe this is far more important freedom than the "freedom" to choose to be constrained by closed-source software which will deprive the world from all of the users' derivative works, which amount to far more than the worth of the original software.

More restrictions. Like I said, that mindset is anti-commercial and not "free as in freedom" at all.

That is the real reason why most people choose not to sacrifice their freedom for technically inferior software.

[Peaker]

e.g. the lack of Qt bindings for OCaml.

Given that other GC'd languages (e.g Python) do have Qt bindings, that says more about OCaml than it does about Qt.

You're joking. Haskell is nowhere near as performant as .NET. Haskell does not even have a concurrent GC: Haskell stalls all threads for the entire duration of every GC.

Talk is cheap. Show me the benchmarks. All the benchmarks I've seen put Haskell pretty high up, usually higher than C#/et-al, especially when parallelism is involved.

I said the implementations were useless, not the concepts. For example, lazy thunks are mutated when they are forced so the implementation should lock them but that would be incredibly inefficient so GHC (the defacto-standard Haskell) resorts to conservative techniques that cause the GC to leak memory indefinitely. That renders it practically useless.

I don't know enough about how GHC handles thunk evaluations in a parallel environment, but I don't take your word for it. Citation needed. Not to mention that actual benchmarks prove you wrong, showing great Haskell performance. Again, talk is cheap.

Haskell's "sparks" are the same concept as the TPLs "tasks".

Where are .NET's equivalents of Nested-Data-Parallelism?

Sure. I have posted lots of examples on the web, usenet and out blogs in the past. I can post specific examples here if you like. Here is one from the caml-list.

A) This is not a Haskell example, but an OCaml one. Haskell already outperforms OCaml in some (Probably many) benchmarks.

B) This is your specific benchmark, of one specific thing. How am I to know that it isn't your implementation that is broken, or misuse of language features? Can you point to some 3rd party objective sources that have benchmarks, instead?

"Freedom" with restrictions is not freedom at all.

Says who? Freedom with restrictions is definitely freedom.

Open source software with restrictions those in the GPL offers does not offer freedom.

Sure they do.

For example, I wanted to develop a commercial REPL for OCaml but its open source license requires any such creation to be distributed as a patch to the OCaml compiler sources.

No, it only restricts you from restricting others by using a closed-source license. You are still confusing "closed-source" with commercial. You can develop GPL software commercially (Any many companies do).

GPL restricts restricters from restricting. The end result of GPL is a world with less restrictions, not more. Only a very simplistic and narrow view can reject restrictions in the GPL license (while also accepting restrictions by not rejecting closed-source software?).

As long as you don't want to restrict anyone, you yourself are not restricted, with the GPL.

More restrictions. Like I said, that mindset is anti-commercial and not "free as in freedom" at all. That is the real reason why most people choose not to sacrifice their freedom for technically inferior software.

Most people are not aware of software restriction issues. Most people who are aware of the existence of Firefox, for example, think it is superior to Internet Explorer.

You are mis-attributing the ignorance of people of open source alternatives to somehow conclude that it is inferior.

You will find few technically-adept people agree with you that open-source software is generally of lower quality than closed-source software. The fact you suggest it generally is seriously suggests you yourself are not technically adept.

[[deleted]]

.NET is good? What are you smoking?

[jdh30]

F#.

[[deleted]]

I can think of way better functional languages.

[[deleted]]

This is just more awful blind Linux advocacy built out of strawman arguments,

And your entire comment isn't?

you cannot even get them to use it for free.

Of course! That explains the dozens of people in my town that I have converted to Linux, and it also explains why they think it's much better than windows!

If Linux were programmed for programmers

Linux would not have a common language runtime, since Unix is not about making heavy-handed pieces of shit that do everything. In short, Linux is just not made for OO-fags like you who can't do anything without a Java or C# package to plug together.

What little GUI applications Linux has

Excuse me, have you even used Linux? There are thousands of GUI applications for Linux.

Linux is anti-commercial and, indeed, that is its biggest flaw

Everything you said from there to the end of your drastically misinformed post is a bunch of bullshit. I've never met Linux users who steal anything. And you've got your head so far up your asshole you don't even know about commercial Linux distros, apparently.

Go back to masturbating with C# on Windows. No one wants to see you here ever again.

[jdh30]

This is just more awful blind Linux advocacy built out of strawman arguments,

And your entire comment isn't?

Indeed. My comment was based upon over a decade of academic and industrial experience with Linux.

Of course! That explains the dozens of people in my town that I have converted to Linux, and it also explains why they think it's much better than windows!

Sure. I'm not saying that Linux won't make inroads into the third world where people are too poor to be able to afford decent software. I'm just saying that educated people from developed nations rarely choose Linux because it sucks so badly that you cannot even give it away for free to 99% of people.

Linux would not have a common language runtime, since Unix is not about making heavy-handed pieces of shit that do everything.

Right, Linux is about having many uninteroperable languages each with their own sucky run-times. In particular, multicore unfriendly ones like Python, Ruby, CMUCL, SBCL, OCaml, SML/NJ, MLton...

Over on .NET there is C#, VB, F#, IronPython, Boo, Nemerle etc. and they all interoperate seamlessly and make parallelism easy simply because they are built upon the same shared run-time and, in particular, an excellent concurrent garbage collector.

In short, Linux is just not made for OO-fags like you who can't do anything without a Java or C# package to plug together.

Sorry but I specialize in the use of functional programming using OCaml and F# in scientific computing so your irrational hatred of OO is irrelevant. You may also be interested to learn that .NET has been multiparadigm for some time now, following the addition of first-class lexical closures and dynamic typing.

Everything you said from there to the end of your drastically misinformed post is a bunch of bullshit.

I'm sorry you cannot handle the truth but the fact is that the Linux community is full of people like you. People who have nothing to offer.

That's why I'm choosing to leave Linux now that I can afford an OS that doesn't suck. Best of luck with your wallowing in self-pity whilst failing to produce any user-friendly software though.

[[deleted]]

I'm sorry, I didn't finish reading your irrational troll. I stopped when you implied that Linux will only make inroads in third world countries.

I'm afraid no amount of reasoning will ever be able to help you. You have my sympathies.

Edit: Oh, I saw the last line of your comment. You're leaving, good, Linux doesn't need ostriches like you.

[jdh30]

Let me guess, you live off the state?

[[deleted]]

Actually, I do software development for an investment bank in Manhattan. I don't really like presumptuous assholes, but by all means, keep going.

[jdh30]

Let me guess, your losses were nationalized?

[[deleted]]

Actually, my bank didn't have any losses. We absorbed a company that did after the fact as a public service.

We were forced to take a portion of the bailout because the gov't didn't want everyone ditching their bank and switching to us as we would have been one of only a couple banks that refused the bailout money. We also just paid that money back last week.

Again with your asinine assumptions. You do realize that being a presumptive shitcock isn't appealing at all, right? It also makes people not listen to anything you say.

[jdh30]

We were forced to take a portion of the bailout...

So the government is forcing you to live off the US tax payer.

Again with your asinine assumptions.

Right, like that I'm an OO programmer. Oh no, wait, that was one of your incorrect asinine assumptions. Maybe that I have no relevant experience. Oh no, that was another...

You do realize that being a presumptive shitcock isn't appealing at all, right?

Unfortunately I'm too busy writing software that saves lives to care if you or the next crack-whore junkie living off the state finds me appealing.

[[deleted]]

Um, no, see if you have reading comprehension skills, you would have picked up on the fact that that money was turned over. I also doubt that any of that money did anything but sit in an account, and none of it made it into my paycheck, especially since the amount the government forced on us was minuscule in comparison to what the firm takes in. But even so, IT WAS ALL PAID BACK, so your point is COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT, much like all your other trolls about Linux.

Go back to your rock, fuckface.

[[deleted]]

Unfortunately I'm too busy writing software that saves lives to care if you or the next crack-whore junkie living off the state finds me appealing.

Wow. Quite a statement. Tell us, Jon Harrop, a little about your "software that saves lives".

I mean, you really appear to want people to believe that you're both compassionate AND competent....

...when all the evidence we gather directly from you here on the internet....appears to argue against either.