Miguel de Icaza

I appreciate your thoughtful reply!

One (of the many i'm sure) problems here you defined are:
"...who would love to have a way to embed interactive graphs and tables into your papers to make them more understandable for the reader..."

The solution however may not necessarily be a private 'reader', 'player', or 'binary'. Though the 'format' may be 'open' this single implementation isn't.

You bring up Adobe which isn't a very good business case to follow as the very reasons I brought up are pressing the industry to move toward open implementations[1][2], away from 'free' binary distributions and plugins (for a various list of reasons from security[2], to access on other systems/apps).

This really isn't 1999, and CDF isn't yet a popular nor a de-facto standard[1] much like PDF was. Besides you and I are much more capable these days with newer and _open_ technologies are we not (browser, linux, open documents, etc...)?

Speaking of documents, other examples of 'perceived' open standard files are Microsoft's ill faded OSP[3] promise which spawned traction for OD/F[4] and other.

These reasons are why HTML5/CSS3/JS as a basis to create an open two way street for 'documents' and/or formats are so powerful. It is not enough to only provide an 'open' format, but also an open implementation. This way both use of and implementation of such product be beneficial toward academic progress. Why wouldn't that alone be worth it?

Thus a likely more popular solution I am proposing to your…

From my perspective here, you're shifting the goal posts. In particular this conversation began with you apparently thinking that Mono lacked full implementations of ASP/ADO/etc. And I think that might justify the original comment that Linux implementations have been treated as second class citizens. I say might since ADO/ASP are not really part of .NET, but rather independent projects built on top of .NET. But in any case, that hasn't been an issue for many years now.

You have now shifted into claiming that your issue is that the licenses Microsoft released their code under were insufficiently permissive. I could argue against this, because it's at best misleading -- different code was released under different licenses. You can see an archive of one of the CLI releases [1] with the license it came with. Or this [2] is a blog from the Mono founder expressing thanks for Microsoft and ECMA members releasing code under open source licenses. That blog was from the huge 2.0 release, in 2008.

But ultimately that feels like a red herring, even if a fun one! You seemed to believe (as did the person I was responding to) that C# was a Windows only thing. That hasn't been the case for a very long time, and it is completely ridiculous now a days. In either case, it might seem we agree if you think that people are basing their views on obsolete information. But that then rather begs the question of why is that so especially the case here. If I was discussing e.g. javascript frameworks…

> Where did you get that I don't enjoy jokes?

You should read this - http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Feb-17.html

excerpt:

"But our engineering strength is also our social weakness. Countless times as engineers you will find yourself interrupting someone telling a story, an anecdote or a joke to correct a false assumption, provide an extra fact that the narrator overlooked, give a bigger perspective on the problem or point out that the joke premise is actually flawed.

You can identify this behavior because the person interrupting usually starts with the phrase "Well, actually...".

As a kid, I thought this was my strength. I knew a little bit more than my sister. So whenever she would say something, I would quickly interject something like "Well, actually, the origin of the word Shih Tzu means Lion Dog and has nothing to do with the dog's digestive patterns".

Yes, I was really fun to hang out with.

Whoever pulls a "well, actually" almost always shifts the conversation to himself. And now we are no longer following along with your friend's joke, we get to learn how much more you know about the limitations of the Sun Protection Factor scale in sunblock products.

Even the most rudimentary of the well-actuallistas is able to spoil even the best Ricky Gervais material.

But instead of rolling with the punches and participating in a brainstorm of ideas and exploding humor, they contribute interruptions, facts and details that merely produce stop energy on an ongoing…

The catch is, once they do figure out one way of accomplishing a task -- even if it's complicated, unintuitive, and not really what you intended -- they'll cling to it and base future actions on that point of reference. So you can't "correct" the interface without further annoying the users who already figured out one way to do it.

Miguel de Icaza has an amazing post on this:

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2008/Jan-24-1.html

On the Mono download page, available versions for each platform were available as text links, with the platform's logo next to the links. Because of some configuration of the wiki engine they were using, images automatically linked to another page listing all the places where the same image is used. So, rather than clicking on the text link to download the latest version, 95 percent of Windows and Mac users would click on the logo, see the listing of other pages using the logo, scan that textual list for the highest version number (it's near the bottom of the list), visit the page for that one ancient version, and download it.

Aside: Noting that users will only read text as a last resort, and not always even then, I wonder what the success rate is for getting past Firefox 3's "this page's certificate is self-signed" warning. It can't be any better than Mono's.

What's remarkable is Feynman went to great lengths in investigating the crackpot theories, instead of outright rejecting them. I won't even bother trying doing anything he mentions in the article, except for the esalen jaccuzi thing(wink wink). And I am pretty sure I will end up as Feynman did. Geeks and there "Well, actually" http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Feb-17.html

I think the point he is trying to make to audience is he is willing to accept ideas which invalidate what he knows. His believes are verifiable, and though he is willing to give yours a chance, he won't just "let it be" unless it's verifiable.

I read another of his stories in which he took the class to the gym where he had a bowling ball attached to a string hanging down the ceiling in the center of the room. He went to the opposite end with the ball, had his back by the wall, brought the ball to his nose and let it go. The ball swung to the other side, swung back, and came dangerously close to his face(well, at the same spot where he let it go - simple pendulums. duh). He told the students "I want you to know I know and believe what I am going to teach. There are no manifestations or biases - only truth"(paraphrased)

Neat technology, but, even as a rather serious O'Caml fan, even going so far as to use it in production ;), I tend to avoid the FF consultancy because of things like this:

> If you would like to keep up to date with respect to HLVM development, please subscribe to The OCaml Journal.

And when I go to read the online documentation?

> The design and implementation of this high-performance garbage collected virtual machine is described in detail in the OCaml Journal articles "Building a Virtual Machine with LLVM" from January to March 2009.

If you have to subscribe to a pay journal to learn all about it, chances are very good it isn't going anywhere at all.

Also, as something of a counterpoint to the whole "CLR missing on Linux or Mac OSX"... I've not run into many CLR compatibility issues with Mono at all. Also, they're not just doing the CLR; for example they've added first-class continuations (yes, that's right: call/cc!) to the mono VM; for language implementers that's rather attractive:

http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2009/Apr-09.html