I just recently caught an episode of LugRadio.  It caught my attention because it included an interview with Miguel de Icaza of Ximian/Mono fame. 

For those of you who do not aleady know, Miguel will be speaking at our upcoming user conference April 18-21.  Registration is still open at http://www.mysqluc.com/ and if you register by Feb. 28 you save $300!

Anyway, I just had to comment on some sillly things the moderators had to say after the interview with Miguel was over.  One made the comment that it was silly to build YAF (yet another framework) when all this good developer time could have been used to get projects like Beagle out the door sooner.  Do what????   By that same principle I should stop working on my automated testing framework and just test my app by hand.  Why on earth should I build yet another framework.  Anyone who has not experienced the increased productivity of actually using managed languages such as Java and all the .NET languages on a significant project should not comment on the subject.  It only serves to make them look silly.

The moderators then went on to compare Mono/.NET to Python.  I really did a double take here.  Ok, I'll go over this slowly.  Python is a language.  Mono and .NET are platforms.  I'm not even sure how many languages currently target .NET but it's likely over 40, including Python itself.  The speaker tipped his hand completely when later he indicated that he would be hesitant to use an app (I think Evolution was mentioned) if he knew it was done using Mono.  You see, it really has very little to do with technical arguments and almost everything to do with bias.