

The Long Road Home - From Microsoft to Linux - febits
http://www.58bits.com/blog/2011/11/10/the-long-road-home-from-microsoft-to-linux/
A post about my thoughts and experiences as a software developer, leading up to my use of Linux and building my first non-Microsoft based Web application.
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mgkimsal
The "community" observation is interesting, but I'm curious how much of it is
a function of time.

I started with PHP in 1996. While the community was not as large as it is
today, it felt... a bit more alive. People were discovering this 'underground'
tech, and to use PHP on a project was slightly rebellious, when you were
supposed to be using Perl or ASP or maybe even ColdFusion or Java.

But the community changes as more people who are using the tech get involved.
More people end up using the tech not by choice, but by mandate. Current
infrastructure is LAMP, so new hires have to use LAMP, etc. PHP is no longer a
rebellious underground choice - it's a/the standard.

Similarly, I was doing VB stuff in 1993. Rather revolutionary in many ways,
and it felt like a whole new world. People were jumping ship from other
platforms to be more productive in VB. I don't think it was ever 'underground'
like PHP was, but certainly an active, vibrant community of people who
_wanted_ to be using that tech.

Fast forward to the mid 2000s - Rails becomes the new hotness, and people jump
all over MVC. The people who are joining these communities in the beginning
are there by choice. Lots of progress and rapid iterations are possible
because of the passion and focus. A couple years from now, loads of people
will be doing maintenance Rails projects, and the community of Rails people
will be less active and less passionate about things than they are today. Many
of the 'best and brightest' are moving on to node.js and other new hotness.

The cynic in me will point out that the newer members of the community coming
in later will be stuck maintaining "first drafts" of attempts at Rails
projects, that won't have benefitted from updates. I say this as someone who
was shown a Rails 1.1 project in 2010 that had been started 3 years earlier,
but never upgraded. I'm sure that's not the only one.

But... this is also the nature of tech communities. People come and go, but
the people 'going' are often 'going' to the new-fangled stuff, and leaving
behind a mixed-bag that the maintenance generation has to deal with. This
skews the 2nd generation's view of the tech (not always, but some). I know
people who left PHP for Rails, complaining about all the stuff PHP couldn't
do. But they also left behind piles of poorly written PHP - there's nothing in
PHP forcing you to write _bad_ code, they just didn't have the discipline
which something like Rails seems to force.

Long story long... the .NET community seems at a cross-roads, and the MS
corporate involvement in the tech decisions isn't a spanner-in-the-works that
most other tech communities have to contend with. Other tech -
PHP/Perl/Python/Ruby/etc - tend to live and die outside the directives of one
particular company. But the 'top down' community comment was spot on - it's
hard to 'force' community on a group, and I suspect the reason most of the
.NET users don't behave like other communities the OP compared to is that most
of those .NET users don't _want_ to be there. Not saying they hate .NET, but
they just don't have the passion for tech that motivates the visible community
members in other tribes.

~~~
hello_moto
Many open source projects tend to grow because of passion, exploration, and
having fun.

Can't really say the same thing when it comes to .NET or Java.

If we go back to the early 1996-2003, when the web was still "young", there
are plenty Perl/CGI or PHP open source project to explore the capability of
the web. Having said that, if you look at the tools the era produced, are
mostly Forum, Blog, CMS for niche market (games, anime, manga, etc). People
were having fun.

If we go back even further during the 1980-1995 during the UNIX, Linux era,
people were writing command-line tools to explore the OS and writing X11
desktop app for fun.

Move forward to today's open source project: SugarCRM, Drupal (semi-serious),
osCommerce, Magento, Maven, Ant, Cassandra. They're less fun. They tend to be
more serious and "Ready for Business".

Sometime I wish I was old enough to be in the 1980-1990 era. Unfortunately I
was not even in an egg-shaped form yet.

------
skrebbel
Funny - I went exactly the other way, from PHP to Ruby to C#.

The .NET environment is amazing. Its open source community is really picking
up speed lately, the framework docs are top-notch, and, most importantly: C#
is a great modern language with excellent editor support - a _unique_
combination (possibly barring F#).

Java has good editor support (IntelliJ, Netbeans) but, well, it's Java. Ruby
and Python are nice, but can never get the support for maintainability and
refactoring that a statically typed language can. After my Ruby years, I
_never_ want to have to guess what I can do with an object passed to some
method I'm maintaining anymore. And then I didn't even mention all the
framework magic circling Ruby, making it even more difficult to understand
what the code you're looking at does.

The ability to type "varname." and get a list of what I can do with it is _so_
powerful. I can use a (well designed) open source library that I just NuGet'ed
in, without ever even looking at its docs. Can you write PHP without alt-
tabbing to the manual all the time? Can you do it with Ruby?

I'd even choose Java over Ruby for that if I had no other option; I'm no
Microsoft evangelist. I'd probably do Scala if the editor support became
better (which I hope it does), but C# comes pretty damn close to what I'd want
to use Scala for anyway (closures, LINQ, properties, extension methods, even
currying is no problem).

~~~
wes-exp
I am a C# refugee, so I feel I can respond with some authority.

Yes, the enhanced auto-complete capability that static typing enables is a
great feature (I should note that dynamic languages can offer completion too,
just not as comprehensively). But it must be weighed against the tradeoffs. I
believe many of these language features like static vs. dynamic typing are not
"one is better than the other", but simply characteristics that make certain
tradeoffs.

A decent comparison of static vs. dynamic typing can be found here:
<http://batsov.com/articles/2011/05/08/jvm-langs-scala/> (scroll down)

For all C#'s strengths, you've got to also consider the negatives. For
starters, you're dependent on Windows; for the development environment and the
server. I don't know if you also do server administration, but let me tell
you: running Windows servers is an exercise in pain.

Second, in an age when many wonderful programming environments are available
as open source, I question the wisdom of marrying yourself to something that
is deeply proprietary. When you're first starting with .Net, you might not
think about this. But years in, you may find that you are stuck in a system
outside your control, dragging your code and livelihood along with it. As I
did.

C# has many strengths and I have great respect for its architect Anders
Hejlsberg. That said, I am very much glad to be free of it!

~~~
skrebbel
Thanks for sharing. Genuine interest: Mono didn't work for you? How so?

~~~
wes-exp
Mono didn't work for me. I think it might be okay if you targeted it
specifically as your official runtime. But it is not, and I don't think ever
will be a drop-in replacement for the MS stuff. I summed up my thoughts here:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2777025>

~~~
ale55andro
I'm in agreement with wes-exp, even though I still have to make the "long walk
home", mono currently offers a workaround or perhaps a _false_ reassurance
that when the requirement comes up, you can still run your apps on Linux.
Truth is it's lagging behind, it does not enjoy good community support
(everybody in the *nix community is against it) and to top it Novell was
acquired recently and the new management put a lid on mono. Miguel has started
a new company but it seems their priority is standing on their feet first (
making money and being profitable). So, no. Mono is not a good alternative for
.net at this point.

------
einhverfr
I was reading the article and the list of three letter acronyms such as WPF,
WWF, WCF, and realizing we should just group these together under the name
Windows Technology Frameworks or WTF.....

On the other hand, the article brought back a lot of thoughts on projects gone
right and wrong. Very insightful and informative. In the end though, I have
learned one thing that was reinforced by this article: if it ain't fun, it
ain't worth it.

Let's face it: that which inspires us is fun. And when we are inspired, even
the largest problems are overcome, but when we lack that inspiration and the
fun that comes with it, it's not only drag, but little problems become
impossible to solve.

~~~
febits
I think that's right - it has to be fun. There might be not-so-fun parts in
every project - but overall, it has to be fun. Thanks for positive feedback.

------
k_bx
Man looked at PHP after C# and was happy with that. I feel suspicious.

~~~
ale55andro
Not very suspicious if you look at how .NET evolved and continues to evolve.
They have had massive changes in their offerings which is a good thing but
frustrating if your a dev strongly invested in what they offer. Often you have
to rewrite your code with each new offering they push. Then ASP.NET Webforms
slow death in favor of MVC, another major rewrite again. Along with the
rewrites you are giving up a huge investment you've made in webforms ( their
previous offering).

From asp.net 1.0 to 2.0 required a rewrite to take advantage of 2.0
featureset. From linq2sql to EF where linq2sql was dropped in favor of EF and
we still have no proper assurance. winforms 1.0 to 2.0 then wpf. Moving to wpf
as you may guess requires a major rewrite. Then the rumors that wpf is dead.
SL is the next best thing. Now they say SL is dead but your skillset will
carry over to building metro style apps.

Perhaps he can avoid all this frustration now!

~~~
kenjackson
Why are you doing rewrites? I still have 16bit MASM code in use. Why would you
rewrite an ASP.NET webforms app because MVC is out? I guarantee you that
you'll want to rewrite your website for some completely unrelated reason
before ASP.NET isn't supported -- I mean they did just ship a new version in
the past year.

I think junior devs feel like everytime something new comes out they have to
rewrite everything to use it. After you've been around the block for a while
you realize that you can pick and choose technologies and maintainance plans.
Once you realize that, you suddenly see a lot of this is just hot air.

~~~
ale55andro
the reason to rewrite depends on the project your involved in and what
features you want to make use of moving forwad. A simple example when .net 2.0
came out, simply upgrading to the latest version of the framework didn't give
your older apps all the benefits of latest features included in 2.0 (new
controls, master pages, provider model support out of the box etc) ; A rewrite
was inevitable. When MVC was introduced everybody in the .net community felt
it was their sacred mission to promote it over webforms. If you wanted to stay
current skillwise and evovle with the community you either rewrote if this was
even feasible or used MVC for the next project ( for most this really meant a
new investment in learning and also not being able to reuse a vast array of
controls and component that were already written for webforms and available,
instead we were reinvesting our efforts in rewriting in such a way that this
was consumable from an MVC paradigm). I agree with you that a lot of this is
just hot air, but not if you are seriously invested as in someone writing
tooling for webforms for instance and your business depended on it, your
customer base dimishes quickly and you have to quickly adapt and rewrite. This
is the same for winforms/wpf/silverlight. People seriously invest in these
technologies after going through a lot convincing top management and what not
because MS promised at some point that they are committed to seeing this
through.

Consider having a product developed in silverlight. Now MS is saying they are
backing html5 but fear not, you can still rewrite it for metro because sadly
IE10 _on metro_ will not support plugins. This is their own plugin on their
own operating system. Not supported! Which is not the same thing because SL
atleast worked on the mac cross platform. Your metro app wont. So, html5? even
still your developing a metro app so forget cross platform or perhaps you can
reuse a lot of the code base but some effort is still required and we're
really hoping for the best. In the end we are rewriting again.

------
pimeys
This article brought back lots of memories. I also used to work in chemistry,
started doing programming (because I somehow knew how to do it in the first
place) and I worked in Microsoft business for years. I didn't want to be a
programmer and I was looking for alternative job options all the time. Then I
met a friend who showed me a bit of Haskell, SICP stuff and I also started
doing projects with Rails.

Now, years later, I love every day being in the business. I'm learning new
stuff every day, like Arch Linux, Vim, Git, EventMachine, Xmonad, the list
goes on... It might not be the same for everybody, but open source world was a
cure for me to start loving my profession. I'm really thankful for that.

