Ah, yes, the increasingly blurry line between Languages and their
Standard Libraries is fast becoming a sordid love-triangle between
Languages, their Standard Libraries, and their Virtual Machine. I
suspect Microsoft did themselves a disservice when they started calling
all of their products Dot Net. It has caused just as much confusion as
it would if I were to start calling all of my employees George.

It appears that when Kate refers to .Net, she is referring strictly to
the CLR (Common Language Runtime, technically an abstract machine) that
executes the bytecodes that result from compiling a (for example) C#
application. However, the CLR is not easily divorced from the " .Net
Framework ", a very large class library which includes complete support
for ASP.Net web development, and is arguably a "web framework". The CLR
relies on classes in the .Net Framework, which in turn relies on
services in the CLR, in a somewhat incestuous relationship.

Kate, I gather it annoys you just as much as it annoys me when people
refer to writing VB.Net or C# code as "Writing in .Net". Please be
careful not to make a similar mistake by equating .Net with the CLR.
ASP.Net is a complete web framework, and although it is IMHO old and
cranky and becoming frail in its advancing years, and not nearly as much
fun as Rails, in its youth it served its purpose well, to provide a web
framework that still looked like simple ASP, with a "Visual
Component"-based API that, while not ideal for web development, was very
comforting to the hordes of Visual Basic developers migrating to the
.Net platform.


Frank

-----Original Message-----
From: kate rhodes [mailto:masukomi / gmail.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, September 12, 2006 10:46 AM
To: ruby-talk ML
Subject: Re: Joel Spolsky on languages for web programmingr


On 9/10/06, Chad Perrin <perrin / apotheon.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 11, 2006 at 07:52:10AM +0900, David Vallner wrote:
> > kate rhodes wrote:
> > >.NET and the JVM and Parrot are just virtual machines that by 
> > >themself contribute absolutely nothing to the productivity of a web

> > >developer.
> >
> > .NET is the whole platform, the CLR is the VM.
>
> You beat me to it -- just as Rails implies the Ruby interpreter, so 
> .NET implies the CLR.

You guys are right but the point still stands. The entire .net platform
is still not something that can, in any reasonable way, be compared to
Rails. They're completely different things with completely different
purposes in life.

You can't write a web app in .net. It's not a language and it's not a
web framework.  You *could* write an app in Django / TurboGears that ran
under /within .net and THAT would be comparable but not because it's got
anything to do with .net.  It would be comparable because Django and
TurboGears are both web frameworks like Rails.

-- 
- kate = masukomi