[ale] .NET considered harmful

[Don Lachlan]

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