[ale] .NET considered harmful

[Brian Schenken]

No wordsmithery could make his silly prejudice reasonable.  He may be
looking for what you accept is a different breed, but he needs to
figure out how to articulate it without delving into his own emotional
bias.  Having written in  .net is not evidence of some sort of
weakness.

Yeah, there's a tremendous market for worthless certs that has
polluted IT's and other's talent pools.  The quality of education out
there has nothing to do with the value of any given technology.
That's apples and oranges...


On Tuesday, March 29, 2011, Don Lachlan
<ale-at-ale.org at unpopularminds.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 5:17 PM,  <brian.schenken at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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.
>
> You're talking about apples when he's talking about oranges and I
> think you completely missed his point.
>
> Seeing .NET on a resume triggers a "Why?" question in his head that he
> wants answered. If it's sprinkled inside a dozen others, it's likely
> easy to explain away - "Employer X wanted Product Y and .NET was a
> requirement." OTOH, if's .NET is alone or in a short list of languages
> on a resume, it's likely exactly what he's concerned about. Same issue
> has been seen with other "easy" languages like Perl, PHP, Java, VB,
> etc.. Nothing new there.
>
> But more than that, he's looking for something special. For the people
> he's looking for, changing languages is not hard. Takes time, some
> effort, but not hard. It's the difference between a computer scientist
> and a programmer. Real the Joel on Software piece and it's the same
> thing - Joel is looking for computer scientists and universities are
> churning out programmers because there are a lot more jobs for
> programmers than computer scientists.
>
>> 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
>
> Sure, I could write a web browser in Perl, but "Why?" Sure, I could
> write a mail server in PHP, but "Why?" .NET is a nice platform with
> some great uses. Hey, if you're working in a homogenous environment,
> Microsoft Office and Exchange and ISS are killer. But would any of
> these be my preferred choice? Possible but unlikely.
>
>> 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.
>
> Strawman argument. The author states there are cases where .NET is the
> preferred choice, such as Windows Mobile 7 apps. You are full of fail.
>
> OTOH, if you can't justify your choice for .NET, if your answer to
> "Why?" is "Because," you aren't the material he's looking for. You
> don't even understand what that material is.
>
> -L
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