A bit of fun for programmers

[doodab]

What does he need? He doesn't mention Java as being equally bad so it doesn't seem to be a performance thing, rather than it's too inflexible because the tools are so good. I've certainly not seen this problem using .NET.

It seems to be a general anti MS rant with a minor tilt at JEE thrown in, the thesis seems to be that if you learn to use the tools that big companies use to do the jobs big companies want done you are making yourself less attractive to small startup companies as you will loose or otherwise fail to nurture the the innovative, can-do attitude that someone who started hacking whatever they could when they were a kid would have.

I can see his point, because the MS stack does a lot of stuff out of the box and doesn't leave a lot of room for reinventing the wheel unnecessarily and hence learning from your mistakes, but from my limited experience of C# .Net I would say it's just as possible to do cool stuff with it as anything else, if you pick something outside the gamut of stuff that it just does out of the box. It's just a bit harder to find something outside of that gamut.

I think he's a bit misguided myself. There are also a few passages where he just talks utter cock.

[DimPrawn]

I couldn't care less if I'm a crap programmer as long as I'm a top invoicer.

HTH

[dang65]

I worked with Classic ASP for several years before ASP.NET came along, and the obvious path was to switch to .NET. But I couldn't stand it. All the simplicity and flexibility which I had always loved about web developing, and still do love, was sucked away. Doing anything even mildly unusual involved horrible work-arounds and compromises. And I hated the feeling of not really knowing what .NET was doing, not having the control to tweak things, and having it spew out HTML which was often almost incomprehensible.

I presume that things have changed now, and .NET suits programmers who don't particularly care about the front-end, but to me it was akin to those old-school car mechanics who had always fixed things with a wrench and a screwdriver and suddenly found they were dealing with sealed modules and circuit-boards which had to be swapped out and the car rebooted and then it would work - but how was it working?

Maybe this guy just prefers people on a personal level who like to really have control over what everything does. Those people aren't better or smarter, and may even be completely deluded and stuck in the mud, but they have a different approach to the Web and to application development as well, and I guess he's just found that they are more suited to the kind of work he does.

Fortunately, web development is now almost invariably split between server-side and front-end on a never-the-twain arrangement, so you just ask the .NET or Java developer to return x, y and z when you request it with your AJAX call or whatever. They seem quite happy to do that, and probably don't give a toss what you do with it on the client-side.

.NET developers are terribly touchy as well, I've noticed.

[VectraMan]

A ten year old .Net technology isn't a trendy new technology

Trendy old technology then. And there seems to be a radically new .NET technology every year or so. I have experience of Winforms, but nobody uses that anymore.

[DimPrawn]

I worked with Classic ASP for several years before ASP.NET came along, and the obvious path was to switch to .NET. But I couldn't stand it. All the simplicity and flexibility which I had always loved about web developing, and still do love, was sucked away. Doing anything even mildly unusual involved horrible work-arounds and compromises. And I hated the feeling of not really knowing what .NET was doing, not having the control to tweak things, and having it spew out HTML which was often almost incomprehensible.

I presume that things have changed now, and .NET suits programmers who don't particularly care about the front-end, but to me it was akin to those old-school car mechanics who had always fixed things with a wrench and a screwdriver and suddenly found they were dealing with sealed modules and circuit-boards which had to be swapped out and the car rebooted and then it would work - but how was it working?

Maybe this guy just prefers people on a personal level who like to really have control over what everything does. Those people aren't better or smarter, and may even be completely deluded and stuck in the mud, but they have a different approach to the Web and to application development as well, and I guess he's just found that they are more suited to the kind of work he does.

Fortunately, web development is now almost invariably split between server-side and front-end on a never-the-twain arrangement, so you just ask the .NET or Java developer to return x, y and z when you request it with your AJAX call or whatever. They seem quite happy to do that, and probably don't give a toss what you do with it on the client-side.

.NET developers are terribly touchy as well, I've noticed.

Don't confuse ASP.NET with .NET (and C#) in general.

Yes, ASP.NET Webforms is a vile cludge.

You might prefer the slightly trendier ASP.NET MVC now that is established a bit more. ASP.NET MVC: The Official Microsoft ASP.NET Site

[doodab]

Someone should tell AtW that this guy likes eating squirrels.

[Sysman]

I think the key to what he's saying is his pointer to Joel Spolsky himself laments schools teaching Java, in which Joel says:

You used to start out in college with a course in data structures, with linked lists and hash tables and whatnot, with extensive use of pointers. Those courses were often used as weedout courses: they were so hard that anyone that couldn't handle the mental challenge of a CS degree would give up, which was a good thing, because if you thought pointers are hard, wait until you try to prove things about fixed point theory.

...

Years of whinging by lazy CS undergrads like me, combined with complaints from industry about how few CS majors are graduating from American universities, have taken a toll, and in the last decade a large number of otherwise perfectly good schools have gone 100% Java. It's hip, the recruiters who use "grep" to evaluate resumes seem to like it, and, best of all, there's nothing hard enough about Java to really weed out the programmers without the part of the brain that does pointers or recursion, so the drop-out rates are lower, and the computer science departments have more students, and bigger budgets, and all is well.

The lucky kids of JavaSchools are never going to get weird segfaults trying to implement pointer-based hash tables. They're never going to go stark, raving mad trying to pack things into bits. They'll never have to get their head around how, in a purely functional program, the value of a variable never changes, and yet, it changes all the time! A paradox!

In other words, he's really after folks who can get down to a low level. I personally think he's wrong to dismiss .net altogether. Surely there is a place in startups to interface with the thing, and to do that one should understand how it works.

[amcdonald]

In other words, he's really after folks who can get down to a low level. I personally think he's wrong to dismiss .net altogether. Surely there is a place in startups to interface with the thing, and to do that one should understand how it works.

In the real world for most people software development moves at such a fast pace that you can't work like that

[Sysman]

In the real world for most people software development moves at such a fast pace that you can't work like that

I'm obviously showing my age.

Is it all laccy bands, duct tape and bits of string nowadays?

[doodab]

In the real world for most people software development moves at such a fast pace that you can't work like that

I would say that you have to understand how it works, otherwise you have no context to fit all of this new crap into and you will struggle to keep up.