Liberation

A while ago my career took a new direction. Before this I was a pretty dedicated code-monkey, deeply embroiled in the world of .NET and it’s associated technologies and culture. When Mono came along, I thought “great, I can finally contribute to Open Source using my C# & .NET skills” and for a while I spent a lot of time working in and with Mono. I also spent a fair amount of time defending both Mono itself and my choice to use it.

It’s been a while since I changed jobs now, and I’m really getting back into the whole “geeking for pleasure” bit. Along the way I came up with an idea for an application that would help out on of my fellow LUGgers and my first thought was to write it in Mono. Then I remembered that Jono had written something similar using Python & PyGTK (something I’ve tinkered with before) so I had a look at his code, played with it for a bit, discarded pretty much all of it and started again. Normally I would most likely have re-implemented in Mono, yet this time – because I’ve not done any serious coding in C# for approximately six months now – I decided to stay with Python and found it:

1. A refreshing change from Mono – everything I needed already installed in Ubuntu 5.10 or was just an apt-get away. No compiling from source to get the current version
2. A nice little language and environment to work in/with

I’ve never been that big a fan of Python, but I’ve got to admit that combined with Glade it really is powerful for quickly creating apps that have little or no dependencies (if you’re using a good distro). Sure if you’re a die-hard IDE person you’re going to struggle as it requires you to know more about the language and libraries you’re working with, but I fail to see how that is “A Bad Thing™”.

Choice

Now this post isn’t just a retraction of my previous comments about Python – it relates to all langauges and frameworks. My on-and-off affair with Ruby on Rails is now back on again, and I find that – again due to taking a step back from .NET’isms – the things I disliked before aren’t really that bad. I’ve even bought the book so that I can better understand it.

So having taken a step back from commercial development practices has allowed me to re-evaluate the Free alternatives, and I’ve found them far from lacking. I’m not going to do a complete U-turn and take Aq’s attitude of “why waste time creating a new language/framework” as I think the achievement of Mono is not an insignificant thing. However now that I no longer rely so heavily on the technologies that drove the creation of Mono, I do understand his viewpoint though.