[ale] .NET considered harmful

[Don Lachlan]

On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 9:42 AM, John Pilman <jcpilman at gmail.com> wrote:
> Microsoft makes him feel bigger.  He spends a lot of the blog slamming
> Microsoft and .NET.  What he says about them may be true, but it does
> not help to identify good programmers.
> If he is looking for programmers who like to program and try different
> things, any short list of languages would be suspect.
> I wish you, Jerald or Don, had written that blog instead.  You both
> did a better job describing good programmers than the original author.

I thank you for the compliment but I think I was repeating the same
things the blog author did. The "programmer" vs. "computer scientist"
(vs. "software developer/engineer") is a nuance I've been trying to
explain to people for 10 years. Perhaps if he had put it into that
comparison, he would've gotten less hate... But I doubt it.

Whenever a new "easy" language/platform/tool comes out, lots of
less-skilled people jump on it because it requires less skill - that's
the point. If you're evaluating someone, don't you wonder why they
jumped to something which was targeted to less-skilled people? It may
have been the right/best tool - trust me, I've watched people piss and
moan about "XYZ sucks" when it *is* the right tool - but very often
the "easy" solution isn't the right solution, it's just the right one
for less skilled people.

.NET is going to be the right/best platform for a number of things -
but if he's hiring for things where it *isn't* going to be, shouldn't
he screen out people who used .NET when the best solution was
something else?

-L