[ale] .NET considered harmful

[brian.schenken at gmail.com]

I hate emotional evangelism like this... "dignified OS" OS's don't have  
dignity, they have function - purpose. "every day spent learning a  
Microsoft kitchen takes TWO days to unlearn, " Bologna. Changing languages  
is hard, it doesn't matter from what to what. That's why I try not to work  
on more than one project at a time.

I started off in PHP, MYSQL, BASH, and a bit of Javascript. I was tinkering  
with some rinky dink internal sites at work, and personal stuff on the web  
BECAUSE there was no budget, I was fascinated by it, and I had nothing to  
lose. Years - and many many LAMP projects - later I chose to use flash for  
a project and learned AS2 BECAUSE I had a bit of a budget and needed to  
make a database driven ***pretty*** visual display. A couple years later I  
struggled for about 6 months to learn visual studio and get used to vb.net  
BECAUSE I'm making tools for windows servers / a .net site that the web  
developers and others at my company need to be able to manipulate. At the  
same time I've further developed my BASH and PERL scripting BECAUSE a lot  
of our stuff is on ye ole solaris/linux machines. Without my evangelism, my  
company is beginning a migration to hosting all of our services to red-hat.  
I hate Red-Hat, but I'm glad to work with linux - and because of where  
we're heading I am taking some Java courses. I just wrote my first  
minecraft module - weeee!

Because of my ambiguity - and laziness, I'm not great at any one thing.  
Luckily, I've never needed to be. My stuff works and I'm usually happy with  
whatever bits and pieces I chose. More importantly: my Baws is happy, and  
my users are happy.

So, you can't honestly describe me as a .net guy, or a linux guy, or a perl  
dude.. etc. Every time I've made anything I've started by considering what  
my options were, who would/could support it, what server would be hosting  
it, how well it would jive with what we have in place already, etc etc. I  
love some of the tools/languages I've worked with, but I work hard not to  
let my admiration of or comfort with a technology have too much influence  
on the solutions I recommend or develop.

There are times when .net is the best solution. Yep, BEST. And it's not  
just the crappy / redundant jobs, sometimes there's a really deep,  
challenging project (I'm talking working with sockets, threads, file I/O  
here - the good stuff) that would be best done with .net. There are times  
when fast, stable, perl would be better suited. On occasion you need free,  
and DIY - but some needs call for something bloaty, expensive and  
externally supported. The more impartial you are the more valuable your  
advice will be. A slick IDE is worth using, it's also handy to be able to  
drop below the IDE and understand the raw technology - HTTP GET and POST  
for example. The article seems to make that same point, but seems to claim  
that it's something to do with Microsoft - that's just technology in  
general.

My point is, in many cases we are trusted with carte blanche control of a  
project. I think it's awful to betray that trust with hangups like the ones  
this dude seems to flaunt. I will proudly place vb.net on my resume along  
with the other technologies I've used. I'll put DotNetNuke above Drupal,  
because that's alphabetical. If this guy were to interview me and ask me to  
justify it I would turn the question back on him: "Can't you think of any  
scenario where .net would be the best choice?" If he says no or gives some  
McDonalds metaphor - I think I'd say he failed the interview. I'd rather  
work for a Baws that could see the elegance or efficiency of a solution,  
despite the language it's written in.

B







On Mar 28, 2011 2:50pm, Charles Shapiro <hooterpincher at gmail.com> wrote:
> Preaching to the choir, but still minorly interesting



> http://blog.expensify.com/2011/03/25/ceo-friday-why-we-dont-hire-net-programmers/



> -- CHS

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