After spending a spell of working dawn to dusk on one program, how do I spend my afternoon to relax? By learning programming language I haven’t inhaled yet!
The other night, I installed Mono on my laptop and desktop; the windows box already has express editions of Visual C# 2008 and 2010 setup. While it obviously tool a while to compile the full stack, it was still faster than most C++ applications I’ve grunted over build times about. The thing that really impressed me however, was how fast MonoDevelop compiled; while not a ‘huge’ program, it’s large enough that the compile time was impressive.
Compared to my experiences with javac over the years, mcs was blazingly fast. Four reasons that I tend to avoid Java development: the tools tend to be make me tap my foot in impatience at the wait times, most Java apps I’ve crossed paths with are not fun, OOP is pushed down the coders throat, and doing Swing layouts by hand is a royal pain.
I’m not a fan of C#, but I do consider the whole CLI/.NET stuff to be a very attractive platform. Perhaps sometime when I’ve got a couple hours to burn, I might pick up Gtk# and write a systray’let to check my mail box or something.