As a former .NET developer (ok don’t tell it to mama!) and Italian native speaker I can amuse myself not only with the strangeness of the anglo-saxon community but with the Italian community’s also! That doesn’t sound like a privilege, though. Gotta rewrite this paragraph one day.
We have the biggest .NET user group in the world as far as I know with thousands of subscribers and MS Italy endorsement. This community has a blog aggregator like our Planet Python and yesterday I went through a post that puzzled me a bit.
The title of the post is (translated): XAML: is it worth the effort?. The Italian .NET MS MVP named Corrado Cavalli responds to his reader making the point about the brand new XML format to handle application user interfaces in .NET. The answer is, obviously, yes but let’s see what I get (with my “pythonized” eye) from it with a F-A-K-E conversation:
.NET Lover: XAML is cool, but by now you have to hand write the GUI in XML. Lawrence: no way dude, XML is for the machines, not for the humans. Look at what happend with that shitty specification named SOAP and all the WS-* bandwagon. XML is good because is text and machine readable. Glade and Gazpacho, our designers of choice spit out XML from the dawn of the world. GTK, QT, Cocoa, you-name-it. Everybody has an interface builder!
.NET Lover: Believe me Lawrence, you don’t get it, there are at least 2 Microsoft interface builders but, hey, at the 1.0 version they will be incomplete. Lawrence: Fine to me, I hope someone will explain the meaning of alpha, beta and 1.0 to MS engineers one day. Anyway, so now we have not one, but two builders! You said I had to struggle with angle brackets all the day to do the hello world demo. You liar!
.NET Lover: I didn’t lie! Lawrence: You didn’t?
.NET Lover: I didn’t lie to you, my former-dotnetter-now-fallen-into-oblivion-of-dynamic-and-opensource. You still have to tune the XML those builders generate! Lawrence: Ah ok! I was worried. Now I’m calm. Things were getting too easy, yup!
.NET Lover: Eh eh I’m sorry I scared you with such fake illusions. I have to tell you a secret. XAML is that cool you can even decouple it from the UIs! Lawrence: Oh gosh! I’m wetting my pants now. What the heck those gazillion developers at Redmond prepared for me little-moron-Pythonista this time?
.NET Lover: Close your eyes or I won’t show you the juicy part of XAML and its greatness. Lawrence: Eyes are closed and fingers are crossed. So tell me!
.NET Lover: Badaboom! If you read this amusing article: Amazing XAML you can learn the next-big-thing. Lawrence: I can’t wait. What this is all about?
.NET Lover: How impatient you are! I’ll tell you… XAML is so damn powerful that you can even use it to to describe your application architecture and the hierarchy of the classes and store it as an XML file! Lawrence: The sky has fallen! My friend, now I have to ask you a question. Why use that?
.NET Lover: It’s cool. XML everywhere is cool! Think of the implications of having your architecture stored in XML! Lawrence: I don’t get it. Why are we running from UML and that kind of stuff then? This feature sounds really “we don’t like UML”
.NET Lover: Ouch, maybe you’re right, maybe not. I told you how cool XAML is and how cool is to use the Shift key all the time to type XML PascalCased tags? Lawrence: I think I’ll stick with what have I in Python…
End of transmission.
ps. if you know Italian, the original post is here: http://blogs.ugidotnet.org/corrado/archive/2006/08/23/46559.aspx
