I must have missed something about this platform transition.<p>First and foremost, where are his customers in all of this? Languages are tools to reach goals for humans. What goals did he not accomplish because of using Mono and C#? What specific business objectives were impaired? How would these goals be more easily achieved now?<p>Secondly, I find it odd that a position on patents would work it's way into a tools choice without there being some kind of firm evidence of trouble. Did Microsoft's decision change the technical environment? Were there problems with building or maintaining code? Or did Microsoft just tick off the open source community and that made him decide to change? Perhaps I missed something, but it was sounding like he was making platform decisions based on some kind of popularity contest or imagined threat. Like I said, I'm ignorant here. Perhaps Microsoft's move has real-world ramifications? If so, I didn't see them in the article.<p>Finally -- what about F# on mono? You've got all the functional programming you can throw a stick at. And you've got objects as well if you want them. I didn't see that come into consideration at any point, although it seemed relevant -- if his interest was functional languages.<p>I also found the comment about the .exe and .dll file extensions weird. So people think they're strange? So what? Once again, what does this practically mean to developers or maintainers? Did it cause real problems? Or does it just look bad?<p>Language and platform discussions always come down to defining criteria: you determine what criteria are important to you and make your decision around that. Sometimes it's speed or conciseness. Sometimes it's availability of programmers. Sometimes it's ability to grow and maintain large code bases.<p>Whatever the criteria, you have to establish them and the stick to them. I prefer "ability to provide value to customers as quickly as possible" over things like "ability to run in parallel" or "ability to easily find programmers", but to each his own. There are great arguments to be made for all kinds of criteria.<p>What I didn't see was what exact criteria was being used. Sounded more like somebody just chasing whatever was trendy at the time.