After talking to Pooja, I felt it necessary to mention the great mathematician G. H. Hardy on my blog. Hardy is most famous outside of mathematics for his "A Mathematician's Apology". The book, written in later in life by Hardy, talks among aother things about how mathematics is young man's game. He is also somewhat know for his association with Ramanujan and for being the person responsible for bringing him to Cambridge where his greatest mathematics unfolded.

Quoting one of the mathematicians, C Snow, that Hardy worked with:
http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Hardy.html

A mathematicians apology is, if read with the textual attention it deserves, a book of haunting sadness. Yes, it is witty and sharp with intellectual high spirits: yes, the crystalline clarity and candour are still there: yes, it is the testament of a creative artist. But it is also, in an understated stoical fashion, a passionate lament for creative powers that used to be and that will never come again. I know nothing like it in the language: partly because most people with the literary gift to express such a lament don't come to feel it: it is very rare for a writer to realise, with the finality of truth, that he is absolutely finished.

Hardy was a sort of purist mathematician, one who did his mathematics not for the sake of its applicability to anything, but for the sake of doing great mathematics. Hardy, along with Littlewood and Ramanujan,  is also mention in Apostolos Doxiadis' "Uncle Petros and the Goldbach Conjecture". The link above gives a short summary on his life.

Some quotes:

Asked if he believes in one God, a mathematician answered: "Yes, up to isomorphism".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._H._Hardy:

It is never worth a first class man's time to express a majority opinion. By definition, there are plenty of others to do that.

A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

Many years back I worked full time at Microsoft on one of the many projects related to Vista (or what was then called Longhorn). Last December I was visiting friends in the Redmond area when one of the jokingly observed how the code I had written for Microsoft still hadn't seen light of day, while two and a half years later, I had moved on and completed my Masters and had started on my PhD.

This wasn't a sort of accidental slip, but I remember we were told at that time that if we had any ideas to suggest for Vista, they better be ideas that will be new and interesting 3-4 years later when the OS actually ships. This is a tall order for any sort of idea, much less for the volatile world of "software project" ideas.

While this seemed like very ironic humor at that time, over the past month or so, once in a while I thought about what that meant. After all, I had spent a year writing all that code. A very busy year at that - I had spent 15+ hours a day, I daresay, that was my average day, struggling with the turmoil of the massive engineering effort that was Vista.

I wasn't a *great* programmer by many standards, but I'd like to think that I was better than many I had encountered. 15+ hours of my time for about a year, took a lot of out of my life and it didn't seem to have amounted to anything! Sure I was being paid a handsomely, but one one like to think that one's efforts contribute to the world in some way as well. After all that year was full of deadlines and things being rushed to be completed and such. What came of all of it? If it came to nothing, what a waste of life that was...

A few weeks back, I got a call from Steve who works with Google (who has a fascinating blog btw), about coming back and working with them on some stuff. I casually asked what happened about the last thing I had worked on, when I was there last summer. I had made some extensions to the Rhino compiler, the largest part of which was adding the yield control operator to it. Steve said that they were using it. Somewhere in the back of my mind I said "What?!".

Maybe my programming has matured over the years. Maybe the ~6 hrs a day I spent in office as an intern produced production quality code. I somehow assumed that it wouldn't see any real world use. Was it really that special that it was ready for real world use? Don't get me wrong, it wasn't bad code. But it was code that only written, not "baked" for years.

Maybe there was another reason. Maybe, it wasn't a property of the code at all, but of the fact that there was something radically different about the outlooks of both these companies. There are many thing one can say about this "difference in outlook", positive and negative things things about both. But a shift that causes developers to feel effective by default as opposed to feeling ineffective by default, is an empowering thought. "If I build it for you, what will become of it?"

Maybe mine was an isolated case of wasted engineering effort and this is nitpicking. If that's so, I'll be happy for it.

This Sunday, Kyle, Michael and I were enjoying a little late morning brunch at the lovely Le Petit Cafe and some light banter about polymorphic lambda calculi. Patrick would occasionally swing with his strange stories, narrated with his uniquely French mannerism. Joie de vivre!

Thus passed a nice Sunday morning when I see a little girl walk up to me. She is short, about 3 foot tall, not quiet opaque and is wearing a bright red cape and hood. She stands by my side, next to our table, and listens to us for a bit. Kyle and Michael were chatting about Kinds and Sorts. Then she says to me "What strange conversations you have Grandma". I say, "The better to understand them with, my dear". I expect her to scamper away, doing whatever it is that she needs to do, but instead she stands there, her large luminous eyes locked in mine. All this starts to get very irritating and I'd wish she would just buzz off when Kyle asks me something. I turn to reply mumbling that maybe I should eat her or something, that way she'd go away. Kyle asks me what I mean. I explain. The two of them suddenly get unnecessarily excited. "You hold him down. I will run for help". Groan...

Thinking back about it, I wonder if the wolf ate her simply because she was so annoying. After all, ignoring rumors, he was trying to get some sleep and there comes this pest asking all these inane questions.

After being relatively upset about Parzania, I found myself at the RSS community page on Orkut. Needless to say, that was even more disturbing. It was without a certain amount of morbid horror that I looked at their polls, their organized report-as-fraud activities, their cyber-lynchings and such.

I usually don't like to deal with this sort of thing. I am complacent, cowardly and comfortable in my relative safety. It bothered me to think that if I had no fear it would be dishonest, or just plain stupid.

I happened to look at my blog and saw Star Trek and the Q next to Parzania, it struck me what the Q might say about India and the RSS. "Your species is always suffering and dying", he would say in his How-entertaining--What-do-you-expect-anyway attitude.

And indeed, what do I expect? The world has always been a barbaric place. We express surprise and shock at the slaughter of Delhi by Nadir Shah, the slaughter of the Sikhs after the assassination of Indira Ghandhi, the India-Pakistan partition riots, the Bombay bomb blasts, the Ghodhra riots, (and hardly just India) the Khmer Rouge regime of Cambodia, the Rape of Nanking, the Hutu-Tutsi conflict, the occupation of Iraq, the massacre of the Algerians... and on and on and on. Just too many to list. In fact so many, that one should ask, what's the big deal? This is, after all, human nature.

People have been always mercilessly wiping out entire populations of "others" based on some definition of identity. Why are we so surprised by this? Why do we expect that in the times of our generation the world should have magically become a "civilized place"? Hardly, if you look at the evidence.

It will be a long time before we turn into a species that is not always suffering and dying. Something truly deep and fundamental has to change about us for that.

In the short term however, in a few hundred years or maybe in our own lifetimes, the vices of our day shall blow away to be replaced by other ones. To make any of them to go away, something fundamental needs to change that invalidates their cause of existence. A little like the way Frown Power and Superman destroyed the Ku Klux Klan, might there be an Indian equivalent? Prosperity? Accountability? Can we motivate such a change?

Q: Let us pray, for understanding and for compassion.
Capt. Picard: Let us do no such damn thing! What is this need of yours for costumes, Q? Have you no identity of your own?
Q: I come in search of the truth.
Capt. Picard: You come in search of what humanity is!
Q: I *forgive* your blasphemy!

For a while now there is a fly living in my apartment. I dont know how it got in there - I usually keep the windows closed (and even otherwise they have screens on them). Anyway, I was cooking the other day and there comes this fly zooming into the kitchen. Thats when I saw it first. I was making pasta, nothing too funny.

I dont quiet know what to do about it. Its one of those fast ones with a not-easy-to-ignore buzzing sound. And it just wont still, it insists on flying around. I have tried, unsuccessfully, to swat at it and such. I am not sure what to do ... spraying it with something like my deo doesnt feel like a nice thing to do. Also, I dont see how it can possibly find its way out.

I finally found somethng that gives me some peace, I can shut it in the bathroom - it zooms in there to annoy me when I go in. I let it out when I go in and then try trap it back in there again. Lets see how long this game continues.

Srikanth Chunduri visited me this weekend. The last time we met was in Hyd 3 years back. These days  Srikanth is up to living the life of a fast paced New Yorker in the financial district. He introduced me to some music from XLRI... enjoy.

If you don't understand Hindi, I would advice that you don't go about singing this without having checked the meaning of the lyrics with a friend. Enough said.

Here is another piece, which I would rather not embed on my blog:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_KT3sMR4CY

Enjoy.

I spent the past two days recovering from a trip to New York. Recovering from the stress of meeting an old friend in whose company, the both of us inevitable live larger than life.

Abhijit and Shweta drove me down to NY – a 16 hour drive from Bloomington, Indiana which we covered in two days on the way there.

Bad weather

and the general monotone of a long drive in a closed car on a US highway were the dominant aspects.

Anand is doing his PhD in Social Anthropology at Columbia University.
New York, with Anand, was great city to visit

with sky scrapers

and statues,

and seagulls,

and interesting cuisine,

and public transport,

and strange dancing light creatures,

and buildings with character.

Christmas night was spent over poker with Jose and Shweta, Marilyn and Ashok and Shweta’s sister and her husband. The day after Christmas was spent at a Jazz bar in Harlem which had great music – partly prompted by the fact that the godfather (James Brown) has passed away. All of this punctuated by fairly insane amounts of walking, drinking, late nights running into early mornings and several other things that one can do insane amounts of, in three days.

All in all, much to recover from.

Here's linking to Anand who has more intense things to say.

I have been getting my brain fried the past few days trying to relate call-by-need and delimited continuations. Staring vacantly into space I noticed my little flying certificate from Cornwall. Happy memories, hence the post –

Granite cliffs around Land’s End, Cornwall taken from a Cessna 172 that I was flying.

(Yes it’s safe to let go of the controls of a small plane like that for a short while)

On foot this time.

Since many of my blog entries have ceased being blog entries and have become more beacons of the fact that I am trudging through life, here is another life update.

I am back in Bloomington, Indiana after a great summer. After many years have I had a summer that left me with so many memories. I spent the summer in Cambridge, UK and like I was telling one of my friends here at IU (Indiana University) that Cambridge is like a distillation of the essence of several Bloomingtons put together, and then matured over several hundred years – a little like comparing a fine Scottish whisky to beer – maybe a 16year old Glenmorangie in burgundy wood to a Guinness.

I made it a point to travel as much as I could this summer – as much as time and finances would allow. And it was great. I look at some slight embarrassment at the rant about Cornwall below. But yes I had a great time at Cornwall. Cornwall aside, took several trips to London, went to Norfolk – Hunstanton, Cromer, Great Yarmouth. London’s a pretty amazing city and I haven’t been to most of the major touristy spots. Spent some time gallivanting around Cambridge – went to Peterborough and Ely – saw the famous cathedrals. Went to Granchester – the little village near Cambridge.

However most of the really great travel came towards the end of summer. I had a chance to finally go to Scotland. The trip to Scotland was primarily motivated by a long standing wish to go see Skye – the island of Skye – like in the famous Robert Stevenson poem “over the sea to Skye”. Scotland was amazing in many ways – firstly it was beautiful. But that aspect of it didn’t impress me much initially – in my mind I kept comparing it to the highranges in Kerala and not seeing much more there. But after a while you realize how much grander Scotland is – the deep lochs and the high lands and the people. I got a chance to spend two night at the bank of the Lochness in a little town called Fort Augustus. At Fort Augustus I picked up a liking for good single malt whisky. I never had a liking for hard liquor before – but this is great. Favourites? Hmm… I like a Glenmorangie (esp in Burgundy wood), The Macallan, Dalwhinnie; I like this really interesting whisky liquor called the Glayva…. Scotland was interesting in other ways too – here was a land that was under conflict with the English for many hundred years and they too, much like India tries to hold on fiercely to their traditions. Scotland of today is not much like that, but an Scotsman you meet will be only happy to make clear to you how they are not Englishmen. It was alsoa funny parallel that very often tartan patterns on kilts were like the checked patterns on mundu back in Kerala.

After Scotland the next major travel was to Paris and then to Rome. Paris was good, Rome was great. I think aside from a love for whisky another take away from summer is the need to be Italian and to speak Italian – I am so amazed by that language – I have taken an instinctive liking to it. It also partly has to do with a good Italian friend I made this summer (who also happens to be a logician in his free time). More on all that later. Honestly these days there is too much to write about, and so many things to say about every little thing – I need to sort out my time for blogging a little more carefully.

Hairy Coo!

After several weeks (running into months) of blog silence, here is a post.

I have been busy. Been teaching myself several new things. Life in Bloomington has been good on the whole.

Several good things have happened in life. I am on the verge of finishing my first formal paper in computer science. I have been teaching myself how think in formal terms, not just as a programmer, but like a computer scientist. It is an interesting process.

My first paper should be about the yield operator – it turned out that what was idle tinkering and curiosity over the past few years actually seems to have given rise to something of theoretical value. The paper has some formalizations of things, reference implementations, comparison with existing operators and such. Looks like I just may have enough material for a follow up paper as well.

I have an interesting summer job. I am going to be (finally) at Microsoft Research in Cambridge. I am going to be an intern working with Simon Marlow and at this time it looks like I will be working on a parallel garbage collector for Haskell. It should be good fun to get back to writing systems code for a change.

I have seen so many things in code that I am unsure of code that I write these days. I keep seeing demons in my code. Most of the time I don’t code. When I do, and I intend to use it, it is usually in some extreme language – ruby being one extreme and Haskell being the other. I am afraid of what code I will actually write, when I get down to it and if I actually think about the code. There is an interesting Phil Wadler paper titled “Imperative Functional Programming” – I am afraid that if you give me C these days code I write maybe better described as Functional Imperative Programming. Maybe not that bad though.. at heart I think I am still an imperative programmer – a little shaken, but I can still see the machine execute in my head.

I also spent sometime writing a little book. It is incomplete, but I offer it for download here. If you are the sort, do read it for the fun of it and give me feedback. My intention is to add for text and add more machines and make it a more complete “little” book.

It is a book about abstract machines – machines that will teach you the essence of programming languages and constructs. It shows you how several constructs work in a concise formal way to the extend that you can take the definitions in the book, apply the syntax of your favorite language to it and create your own interpreters and potentially your own programming languages.

The Little Machines

Thats all for now. More when time allows.

ps. If you have any suggestions about places to visit in the UK and such let me know. I am looking for interesting things to do in the time I can take away from work.

Some quotes and thoughtlets collected over the years. Some are my own, though I don’t know which ones exactly – over time it has all got mixed up in my head.

From Roshan to language designers of the future, on the topic of programming language types:

If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands.

(adapted from Douglas Adams).

I just fixed the last bug!

Any sufficiently advanced bug, is indistinguishable from a feature.

-- quoting Prof Andrew Lumsdaine, Advanced Operating Systems (P536)

Marvin: "I am at a rough estimate thirty billion times more intelligent than you. Let me give you an example. Think of a number, any number."

Zem: "Er, five."

Marvin: "Wrong. You see?"

The mattress was much impressed by this and realized that it was in the presence of a not unremarkable mind.

-- Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything

Life! Don't talk to me about life.

Ok, so what the answer?

Its 5,1,1,3,2…

No, no, no, I don’t like it..

You don’t like it?

It doesn’t mean anything, what does it mean?

Now that’s a different question.

-- solving the universe selection problem, Quantum Programming

When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

Would you like tea or coffee?

Mathematician: Yes.

-- quoting Michel Salim

What do you mean its third party fault? I can’t get my work done and you are partying?

It’s an idea so simple, that understanding it messes your mind.

-- adapted from Dan Friedman, Principles of Programming Languages

Creating a great language doesn’t involve assuming that your users are less smart than you.

The language that you use defines what you can most easily think of. Languages instill patterns of thought. Certain languages make difficult the understanding of certain ideas.

A novice was trying to fix a broken lisp machine by turning the power off and on.

Knight, seeing what the student was doing spoke sternly- "You can not fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong."

Knight turned the machine off and on.

The machine worked.

-- AI Koan

Lambda the ultimate.

-- Dan Friedman

The only law in physics that we know of that has a direction with respect to time is that of entropy.

-- QP class, B629 Computer Science, Indiana University

Accept it. We are Labor.

A style makes explicit what a language makes implicit.

-- Dan Friedman

What I was coming to is that its something that cant be expressed in the lambda calculus.

But that’s obvious.

-- quoting Amr Sabry

Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

-- Richard Feynman

This is not even wrong.

-- Amr Sabry

There exists no formal method to convert an informal argument into a formal one.

-- quoting Amr Sabry

There exists no reversible classical function that coverts a quantum superposition into a classical state.

-- above paraphrased by Roshan

Misguided rambling from Roshan: Computer Science to Physics and Back Again

There exists no formal method to convert an informal argument into a formal one. This is roughly equivalent to the second law of thermodynamics - the total entropy of any isolated thermodynamic system tends to increase over time, approaching a maximum value. This is also our only formal notion of the quantity called time. Here the law is rephrased as follows and things brings out its directional property with respect time, more clearly - It is not possible for heat to flow from a colder body to a warmer body without any work having been done to accomplish this flow. Energy will not flow spontaneously from a low temperature object to a higher temperature object. This is roughly equivalent to saying that there is not no notion of a partial computation without a notion of sequencing with respect to time – this is the ‘.’ (dot) sequencing operator of the pi calculus. The lambda calculus does not define sequencing. Are all closed systems pi-systems?

Don’t worry, we are just playing games.

Summary of the known laws of the fictitious universe –

- There exists at least one notion of fundamental duality. Using this all other forms of duality can be derived.

- There exists at least one notion of self referential quantification. Using this all forms of self referential quantification can be derived.

- There exists an order of relationship of things among themselves. There exists an order of relationship of events among themselves. In other words there exists at least one notion of ordering or sequencing.

The Tao that can be described in words is not the true Tao

The Name that can be named is not the true Name.  

From non-existence were called Heaven and Earth

From existence all things were born.

In being without desires, you experience the wonder

But by having desires, you experience the journey.

Yet both spring from the same source and differ mostly in name.

This source is called "Mystery"

Mystery upon Mystery,

The womb giving birth to all of being. (1)

- Tao Te Ching, as translated by John R Mabry

All consistent axiomatic formulations of number theory include undecidable propositions ...

Gödel showed that provability is a weaker notion than truth, no matter what axiom system is involved ...

- Gödel Escher Bach, Douglas Hofstadter

This is the sort of thing I have avoided writing about and thought I would not be, for a long time to come – I was afraid to too, mostly because I felt I would be able to or would get too involved in warding of the slack I would get for saying this. But reading this article that Sriram had linked to in his blog brought a mountain of stuff tumbling down. (I don’t know why I am so much into this software-ethical-stereotype thing these days, I have work to do you know). Before you go ahead and read the article linked above, here is what I have to say. This is not a long story, but one of those minor incidents that have stuck on to gnaw at my phsyche.

Rewind several years back to when I was in my second year of undergraduate studies. I had just got my first computer (yes) and Pooja had got hers. We didn’t really have internet connections those times, though we did have the modem and required hardware. We eventually figured that if we needed to talk to each other, we could use one of those direct modem-to-modem dialup software. After a lot of tinkering with dialup software and modem settings, we had something going that mostly worked for us. I had a copy of some old dos based software – I cant seem to recall its name – that we used to dialup each others computers and basically ‘chat’.

The software was the most reasonable one I could find for our purpose, but was however seriously limiting and got rather frustrating after a few weeks of use. God-geek-in-the-making that I believed myself to be those days, I figured that the only way I would get things to happen my way is by writing a modem communication software of my own. (I know what most of you might be thinking, but those days it wasn’t too surprising to see how often this particular approach was the panacea to all my ills).

Those days I also got a chance to talk to one of the few men who seemed to know everything, or atleast had a damn good idea about how to get to know the few things that he might have missed. I got a chance to talk to Jayakrishnan K about the modem’s idea that I had on my mind. JK would know about these things – he should because he had written Kerala’s first BBS (bulletin board service) by hand (as a couple of COM files on a DOS machine doing all the multitasking and all). A short discussion later, I had my head full of X-Modem, Y-modem, Z-modem etc and I was reasonably charged up. The error control would be hard, he had warned me, but that was ok.

So I got home and start off, eventually I figured that I probably wasn’t as smart as I thought I was. I was using intervue (Ralf Brown’s fabled Interrupt List (Ralf Brown is now Professor at CMU)) for reference. Somehow some things didn’t seem to make too much sense and I needed more information on how to initialize the modem correctly.

This is where GPL stepped in. I turned that in the pile of commonly shared source and software in the college students circles I had a piece of software that did modems communication. I wasn’t really sure what the full intent of the software was, but It has what I wanted – it had assembly code to initialize a modem and set all the settings and such. And being assembly code that manages a hardware device there weren’t too many ways about – you had to load some registers, write to some ports, call some interrupts etc in a certain fixed sequence of ways. Well if you are creative, you can think of several ways of accomplishing the equivalent of

Mov AX, 10

But that by itself didn’t mean that the code to initialize the modem would be written very differently by me, once I had seen how it is to be done. It also turned out that the software (as you would be expecting by now) was GPLed.

After the excitement of reading the ASM snippet I had a look at ‘COPYING’, the GPL text file. It seemed to me that if I were to use this piece of code from here to write my modems software to talk to Pooja the entirety of the code that I write would have to fall under the GPL license. It would not be my code anymore. Which is to say, that I would not be free to decide what I do with it – weather I sell it or hide it or share it – that choice would not be mine anymore. That was really disturbing for a while, because here I was wanting to write that piece of modems communications software to talk to a friend and I had a solution in hand, but there was nothing I could do about it – without subjecting myself to legal risk, had I written the software and shared it around without giving away my code. That was my first introduction to the viral nature of the GPL, though at that time the only word I could think of was ‘unfair’.

Then I figured that I probably needn’t tell anyone and I could write my software anyway. But then I wondered what would happen (with the notion of fame) that I had this famous piece of software and then one day someone realizes that I actually did have this piece of software on my hard-disk and then they would say that I stole this code illegally. This bothered me a lot because I like to think of myself as an ethical person and tend to get reasonably bothered by the converse. Immature as it may seem, I also wondered if no one could ever write modem’s communication software again.

And in time the feeling came to pass, and my code never got written and we used the same old piece of software until we bought ourselves internet connections and things blew over. I still wanted to know if there was a way out.

Years later when I had my first chance to meet Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and the GNU project and author of the GNU GPL, I wanted to know if there was a way for me. But in the passing time many other things were beginning to affect my thinking and I was beginning to be more bothered about the small programming communities and their spirit of unbounded sharing and coexistence with the commercial world that the rising tide of GPL acceptance seemed to be wiping out. I feared for those communities and I felt I was part of them.

When Stallman finally did come, he was visiting model Engineering College to talk about the danger of software patents – on his first ever visit to India. And then there were people there at the talk, who were asking Stallman how they could detect if someone has used GPLed code in their own software, maybe after modifying it. How they could track down these people and bring them to court. And there I was, wanting to ask the exact opposite – about how I could be protected for using GPLed code because there was no other obvious way to do something esp once you have seen one approach that solves the problem. The question about who protects the programmers.

My question never got asked.

People around me told me that my concern was unfounded. Things like that don’t happen. Nobody is bothered if you take from GPL code they said. Its just there to be a moral standard they said.

Last year, for some uncalled for reason, the topic came back again. This time over train ride home to Cochin from Bangalore when I was traveling with Sidharth. He didn’t see the problem and I was going on raving from the Karnataka border to Ernakulam railway station that its getting dangerous that there is so much GPLed code out there just lying around on the web, crawled by search engines and popped up at you without your ever intending. And if you took from these – copy paste from your browser that smart little three line snippet – you are strictly speaking, subjecting yourself to illegal usage of GPL code.

Over the years also I have developed this habit in programming when I am stuck I usually search the web for a solution. Maybe a smart little hack or a piece of advice on how to do something and I am chugging along smoothly again. After joining Microsoft two months back a few colleagues here advised me against doing this – you never know the legal implications of what you are doing they said. It seemed a little odd then, but then maybe I had been forgetting where I was coming from. I do use the web a lot – but now with this additional fear factor and layer of caution – and I wished I lived in a world where ‘freedom’ was a different, more real sort of freedom of choice.

Then I found this article : http://www.icsharpcode.net/pub/relations/amatterofinspiration.aspx

I do not know who is right and who is wrong in this debate, but I can empathize with the factors that caused it to originate. This is from the group that creates the rather well know .Net IDE called #develop – an alternative to VS and commercial IDEs and is often recommended to students…

I had been procrastinating making this post for some days now. Esp Chris Pratley’s words ring so close to my fears “I've been a little gun-shy of blogging about Word for fear of being inundated by what are as far as I can tell a gang of "net thugs" who roam the net making...”. Hopefully this will be the last thing I need to have to say about this entire topic for a while. My blog is getting increasingly dedicated to writing stuff that I get dragged into rather than stuff I like getting into.

DO NOT hold this in perspective of my employer or any previous employer or any other context - these are purely my OWN OPINIONS done on my own steam and is not nor was ever was part of any job description of mine.

If I missed something in the above set, I apologize.

You can read it all and more here -

http://mm.gnu.org.in/pipermail/fsf-friends/2004-October/002484.html

The reason this applies to me is because I often talk to my juniors at college and to students as well as professional developers about .Net. I do talk about it as an open platform and I believe that they should adopt it, learn from it, use it and develop on it. (A few days back I had come across this)

Sriram, now you know why (like Jack Nicholson) says ‘we can’t all get along’. I have tried and fell flat on my face, several times.

Noufal, now you know why I don’t think that MIT’s AI labs success has nothing to do with the GPL and think that the FSF is a political agitation/movement more than anything about technology or software. Unfortunately their sphere of influence is around technology.

If the things I do warrant that the above apply to me, then I am not ashamed of any of them.

Kids, if any of you in college are reading this, then here is a piece of mindspace – you are in college/university to be learning, not to be religious or have political ideals. Learn the goods and bads of every system – but more fundamentally try to learn about as much as you can about the art of computer science – that is so rare and there seem to be so many fewer people who know about it.

Now, here are some basics, you just need to be able to read and think to understand these. If you know how to use a web search engine, then you could have

Standards

The open/free standard - http://msdn.microsoft.com/net/ecma/

I intentionally use the words above, because there is No definition of the English language use of the above words that is violated in the way they are used above. If word x means y in a certain political ideal, in my personal sense of ethics, followers of y cannot call those who understand x as x to be non-conformant. Your mileage on that may vary.

The standards document – the Common Language Infrastructure – which is to say the way the runtime should work.

Its architecture.

Its file formats

Its API

Its opcode / IL / bytecode – whatever you call it

The C# language.

The above are also ISO standards under ISO/IEC 23270 (C#), ISO/IEC 23271 (CLI) and ISO/IEC 23272 (CLI TR).

Microsoft does not own or run ECMA or ISO.

Patents

About the patents, here is a mail by Miguel of the Mono project.

http://www.mail-archive.com/ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org/msg05784.html

And look at this

http://samgentile.com/blog/archive/2003/02/19/2647.aspx

Implementations

Microsoft offered the SSCLI source code

http://msdn.microsoft.com/net/sscli/

Works for BSD, Mac and Windows

The BSD bit patched for Linux is here - http://www.macadamian.com/products/sscli/download.html

These are governed by a non-viral not-for-commercial-use license

http://msdn.microsoft.com/MSDN-FILES/027/002/097/ShSourceCLILicense.htm (print it out, it fits on a page)

Mono

http://www.mono-project.com/about/index.html

http://www.mono-project.com/about/faq.html read the faq, before you ‘decipher’

Maybe I am a fraud who is lying about all of the above. Do you love the .Net technology; do you talk to others about it? Do you write commercial/proprietary software? Maybe you are a liar-fraud too.

Btw DO NOT hold this in perspective of my employer or any previous employer or any other context – these are purely my OWN OPINIONS done on my own steam and is not nor ever was, part of any job description of mine. Maybe I am writing this hastily, if I am wrong, I will correct myself. Personally, I have an objection to being called unethical.

I got to meet vice presidents S Somasegar and Eric Rudder yesterday. They were at IDC as part of an exec visit to India. Eric struck me as a thoughtful and intelligent person. He was technical advisor to BillG for a while, so that’s saying a lot.

While a lot of things cannot be discussed in a public blog, I do like the way Eric responded to one of the questions during the open forum. This question was related to losing market place in the very small business and personal use scenarios due to the often posed ‘good enough’ argument against commercial software. Among other things, Eric said that if ‘good enough’ is good enough, then we deserve to lose.

That’s taking on a much larger commitment that just saying that we will make good products and sell them, I think that that’s saying that in time the quality of what we can do will change what good enough means. That’s a measure of a company and will unlike most others ‘big’ guys in this line.

I also spend part of yesterday thinking about the ‘ethical’ argument with which non-commercial software tends to propagate and justify itself. I remember receiving lots of feedback on my talk about the commercial software model at the first anniversary of the Bangalore .net user group.

Not a lot, but a significant amount has been said from the perspective