
Leaving .net - chrislloyd
http://whatupdave.tumblr.com/post/1170718843/leaving-net
======
mahmud
_There were already open source MVC web frameworks and an army of .net
developers who could have collaborated to make them great but nothing much
happened._

He is lamenting that the .NET community didn't embrace the pioneering MVC
frameworks from the OS community, but waited for Microsoft to deliver its own
"blessed" framework.

Here is what he is forgetting: Economics. A good chunk of .NET developers are
not using the system for the love of hacking. No. These people want to learn
marketable skills and get/keep jobs. Whatever MS pushes out is what the market
will buy, and hire for. What do you think killed Borland? Certainly not the
lack of excellent quality products. Rather, their incompatibility with
Microsoft. Even if your engineering is superior to Microsoft's, you can't
afford to break rank, since the market will not follow your lead.

I went to a D.C. area meeting of early .NET adopters, a group of hardcore MS-
specialists working for gur'ment. One of the organizers had a fat .NET book on
the table, which he slapped with his palm three times and said: "Gentlemen,
this is where the money is at". You could have taken me to a brothel
afterwards and wouldn't have felt _dirtier_.

.NET is nice and you can do pretty things with it, but corporate platforms are
first and foremost careers and cash-cows for people. The broke mofos are out
there hacking on GHC and SBCL.

~~~
d4nt
I agree, but would add this.

Microsoft's (development) tools have never had any underlying principles other
than: enabling people with minimal knowledge to get stuff done.

Thinking back through MFC, COM, VB v1-6, Access, SharePoint, WebForms and
ADO.NET, none of them were characterised by any particular architectural
purity or design aesthetic. But they enabled a generation of corporate
developers to hack stuff together quickly (I know MFC and COM aren't all that
easy but they were easier than just using the WinAPI). Which is why businesses
liked the Microsoft stack and hence 9-5 developers flock to them.

What's interesting is that in recent years Microsoft has been infiltrated by
other schools of thought. It's like there's a three way war going on. On the
one hand there are VB.NET people using WebForms, EntityFramework, VSS and
SharePoint to hack together stuff that will be thrown away in 2 years. The
TFS, SQL Server, BizTalk and Dynamics people want to bring in some enterprise
style rigour to the whole thing. While the C#, Linq, MVC crowd are trying to
keep everything loose and open.

I doubt this is any kind of conspiracy to retain mindshare. It's just that
Microsoft got big and Bill Gates started stepping back, so it lost much of
it's direction.

I sense a real but rarely articulated confusion among the 9-5 developers about
all this new stuff. There are 3x the number of frameworks and tools coming out
of Microsoft these days, which ones will all the enterprise recruiters be
looking for in 2 years? Nobody knows.

~~~
jbarham
> ...hack together stuff that will be thrown away in 2 years

Hah! Just like those all those VB6 apps that have been thrown away?!

~~~
thebigshane
So true, but I think he meant "hack stuff together with the intention it will
be thrown away in 2 years"

~~~
contextfree
More like "hack stuff together because if we don't get more business quickly
we won't be around in 2 years anyway"

~~~
apl
Well, if I may, even more like "hacking stuff together that SHOULD be thrown
away within two years but never is".

------
ihumanable
I can't agree more with the observations on MVC. It's really a symptom of .Net
and Microsoft locking in the vast majority of inexperienced users with overly
abstract components.

Developers fresh out of college who were taught .Net in school and get a job
in it become experts at Partial PostBacks and Code Behinds and binding data to
the latest whiz-bang GridDataAwesomeControlForTheWin.

The problem I've seen time and again is that they have no idea how this is
implemented. Ask a green .Net developer about the ViewState lifecycle and see
if they know how that really works.

I don't mean to disparage all .Net developers or to try and say that being a
.Net developer precludes you from ever understanding how these things work. I
am trying to say that for a lot of people for whom coding is their 9-5 way to
make money, they will never look behind that curtain to better understand
their craft. They will believe that Microsoft invented Model View Controller,
they will only get exposed to technology at the pace Microsoft cares to expose
them to it, and that's a shame.

There are probably a lot of 9-5ers who could have that switch flipped and go
from code monkey to craftsmen, but they are stuck doing WebForms and have
never really got bitten by the curiosity bug in the face of the stale joyless
Microsoft platform.

Other platforms can be just as dangerous, even RoR has a preponderance of gems
that solve common problems in web development that there are probably RoR web
devs that have never thought about have you would implement authentication on
the web, just slap :acts_as_authenticator_unicorns_rule on the model. It just
seems to be a much more pernicious problem in the .Net community and one that
grew up out of trying to hide Web Programming and make it Windows Programming
rendered in HTML.

~~~
dangrossman
There are colleges teaching .NET? I'd never heard of that.

~~~
jtdowney
It isn't the first thing they teach you at Purdue but a sizable chunk of CS
and CIT students learn C#/.NET

~~~
dangrossman
Interesting. In my CS degree ('08) the languages used in the few classes that
involved actual programming were: C++, Scheme, Prolog, Python and Java. Never
anything that would require proprietary software like Visual Studio.

~~~
rbanffy
Consider yourself lucky.

A CS degree is not where you learn "market skills". It's where you learn to
build the stuff that will define what "market skills" are.

------
acabal
A sizeable chunk of .NET development happens in the corporate/enterprise
world. That sort of environment isn't interested in collaboration, open
source, etc.--they're interested in the guaranteed support the MS stack
provides, and the idiot-proof web basics provided by ASP/webforms/MVC.

If shit hits the fan in the .NET stack for a big enough corporate project,
someone in the office can phone/email MS and get support for their problem. If
a bug is found in the stack itself, it won't languish unsolved in bug trackers
for years, like many OSS bugs do. MS will probably fix it in their next cycle,
and the corporate devs won't have to waste their time figuring out the nuts
and bolts of the stack to fix the bugs themselves, like in OSS.

So I think it's this requirement for enterprise support that keeps MS from
accepting OSS patches and locking everyone in--it would be too much work to
track, validate, and test 3rd party patches when they can just fix it
themselves with their own devs and keep going to sleep on their piles of money
surrounded by many beautiful women.

Unfortunately this sort of view isn't very compatible with the indie developer
ideal, or the ideals the author holds--which might one of the many reasons why
you see so much Rails/PHP development in the non-enterprise space.

~~~
pohl
_If shit hits the fan in the .NET stack for a big enough corporate project,
someone in the office can phone/email MS and get support for their problem._

That's the canard, but it has seldom worked out that way for me. Whenever I've
encountered a problem that can be traced to a flaw in their products, the
suggestion of calling for support is usually met with riotous laughter. (In
other words, everybody says it's a selling-point of their stack, but nobody
believes it.) Maybe none of our corporate projects have been "big enough". How
big, exactly, does one have to be?

Edit: come to think of it, most of the problems I have seen have been things
that would go against their lock-in strategies, and maybe that's where the
laughter comes from. The solution is always something like waiting for hackers
to reverse engineer something like NTLM, or Samba, or WINS, or exchange
integration...

~~~
acabal
A company I worked for in the past (MM pageviews a day, you've probably heard
of them) was a big MS proponent and an early adopter of some of their new
stuff, like--at the time--Silverlight. We had a fairly direct line to someone
at MS if something crazy happened. It might not always get fixed right away (a
bug that might need to wait for the next cycle), but MS was always on top of
what needed fixing.

Contrarily, we had one guy working on some OSS stuff in a corner of the office
--Apache, PHP, Rails, stuff like that. Whenever he ran into a problem that
needed to be solved yesterday, he had to find and call a $100/hour consultant
who may or may not even be able to solve the problem, or even guarantee that
it would be patched at a later date. That's the big MS selling point.

~~~
jerf
"MM pageviews a day, you've probably heard of them) was a big MS proponent and
an early adopter of some of their new stuff, like--at the time--Silverlight."

Yes, and that's about what it takes to get attention. Especially the "early
adopter of Silverlight", you probably had a dedicated team back at MS.

And there are other large companies that also rise to this size. What confuses
me is the 30-person ISV that believes that they can get magical super awesome
support from Microsoft. They can't, or at least nothing better than they can
get from open source. And typically, I find they know it too; they know better
than to try to contact Microsoft, yet they still hold the mythical ability to
do so in their hands like a security blanket. _That's_ what confuses and to
some extent annoys me; saying "I can get support from MS" when it's true makes
sense, but using that as a reason to use MS when it's not is just silly.

It's a big selling point and that's legitimately true, but unless you're
absolutely huge it _doesn't apply to you_.

~~~
thecodemonk
Wow. We are a 10 person company (entire company, not just dev staff), and we
had a major issue and I called MS and the issues was fixed in 2 days. And no,
it wasn't some wierd setting or some hotfix that was already available, it was
a bug in 2008 R2. Minidumps, remote sessions, and long conference calls for 2
days, but they ended up providing some files in the end to work around it
until the next patch.

------
herewego
I work for a mid-size (read: 100+ employee) IT recruiting company and I have
to tell you that this boils down to one thing and one thing only for most
people that have chosen .NET: economics.

If you want to be a developer and you're goal is to give your three kids a
good life, drive that BMW 5 series, and own a $500k house, then you should be
a .NET developer. The math is simple and I have a mountain of data that
supports the reality that .NET developers get paid significantly more (20-30%)
on average than any of the hot whiz-bang alternatives (Ruby, PHP, Java, etc).
The average mid-level .NET developer in a dev-friendly town (san fran, boston,
new york, etc) is making $80-90k, Senior $90-110k, Architects $110-130k,
Director/Managers $130-160k. Those are averages that don't include bonuses.
There are of course exceptions (finance industry add 20% to the above figures,
start-ups subtract 10%, etc).

Never underestimate the position that money holds in ones relationship with
their chosen path in life.

I think the authors argument is valid and is the reason why most of the
developers that leave the .NET world do, but my observations indicate that
most .NET/MS developers are lifers.

On a side note, I actively practice development in.NET, PHP, Java, and a few
other languages at my 9 to 5. I like to think that I'm fairly unbiased.

~~~
jeremymcanally
Your numbers must be pretty outdated for Rails people (or maybe you don't
recruit into well-paying gigs) if you think those figures are well above what
we're making. I'd say _most_ salaries are comparable to that.

And I think you're probably right for PHP and Java. The talent pool is
saturated, so there's little "demand" for that sort of employee. "Oh you want
$70k? Sorry, we've got 10 candidates who will take $40k. Bye!"

But outside of the markets you specify, I think the same situation exists for
.NET developers. I know a good number of .NET devs who work in government
contracting work and make about half what you say they should make. I know a
few who work for product companies in towns other than the ones you mentioned
that make about half also.

It's probably different markets, business models, but let's not act like .NET
is some magical cornucopia of money that will shower you with many monetary
blessings if you just sell out to it (this coming from someone who worked in
.NET from its beta until right after 2.x came out).

~~~
herewego
Ruby in particular is hot right now and they're fetching higher salaries
relative to other OS languages, you're correct about that. I clumped them all
together in my query, and PHP (and Java to a lesser extent) pulled the average
down.

Also, notice that I didn't specify junior developers on the salary scale -
they're all over the place in terms of salary.

Government contract work is always the exception in any industry. I think
that's a given.

~~~
ryanhuff
Is Ruby "hot" anywhere besides the valley? I haven't seen the significant
uptick in socal, but perhaps I'm missing it.

~~~
msbarnett
It seems to have a lot of traction in the Silicon Forest

------
MikeMacMan
My buddy and I are starting a web project (a Q&A site for translations) and
have chosen ASP.NET MVC. It doesn't abstract away the innards of the web like
WebForms did. It has no more magic than RoR.

Why are we using .NET instead of something like RoR or (my framework of
choice) Grails? Because my buddy knows it inside and out, the tools are great,
and we'd like to minimize the number of unknowns in our project. We're
pragmatic.

There's plenty of .NET open-source projects out there for things like
dependency injection and ORM.

~~~
nopal
Are you participating in BizSpark to get the tools?

------
jasonkester
This guy lives in a different world from me. In my world, .NET is just a
really good set of class libraries and a well thought out templating system
that you can use to present HTML.

I realize that it advertises itself as a lot more than that, and that there
are thousands of terrible ASP:whatever controls and the ability to drag and
drop them in a visual designer, and a nightmare of ViewState and
EverythingIsAPostBack and all that other stuff that people complain about.

But I've never met anybody that uses _any_ of it.

ASP.NET MVC came out, and it didn't change the way I build my stuff in any
fundamental way, because the way it expects you to work is the way that
anybody who knew their stuff was working already. In the middle of ASP.NET
lives a little core of "good". Find it, use it, and you'll be happy.

------
dingle_thunk
People tend to think of Microsoft as much more backward than they actually
are. Yes, Microsoft isn't the brighest when it comes to open-source, but they
do at least try. And yes, if you're going to live in the Enterprise world,
things are a little old fashioned, but that's a reflection of the market, not
the vendor. Microsoft makes tonnes of neat stuff that never gains traction
because people seem to have convinced themselves that MS is an enterprise-only
shop...

Some examples:

[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/efdesign/archive/2010/06/01/conventi...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/efdesign/archive/2010/06/01/conventions-
for-code-first.aspx)

<http://microsoft.com/web/webmatrix>

<http://ironruby.codeplex.com/> | <http://ironpython.codeplex.com/>

<http://visitmix.com/> | <http://edge.technet.com>

<http://officelabs.com> | <http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-
us/lightswitch>

<http://microsoft.com/express> | <http://microsoft.com/dreamspark> |
[http://technet.microsoft.com/en-
us/subscriptions/default.asp...](http://technet.microsoft.com/en-
us/subscriptions/default.aspx)

~~~
cryptoz
I tend to think of Microsoft is backwards because of their reluctance to allow
the Internet to be important. For a decade (say, '00 to '10) they basically
ignored all the good things about the Internet and tried their best to keep
"the old way" relevant.

They're slowly getting better (see IE9, Bing and Office Live...all good, but
also all very recent) but it's absurd how far behind they are on the Internet.

I don't doubt that there are cool, modern projects going on at MS. But they
corporate push over the last decade has definitely been: ignore the Internet.

------
braddunbar
I can't up-vote this enough. I started out as a .net developer. I didn't know
anything else so I thought that's all there was.

I was very wrong.

I'm trying to get out as fast as possible, but applying for a job as a python
developer with 4 years of asp.net experience isn't easy.

~~~
megamark16
I was in the same boat as you a few years ago. I had worked on .NET for a few
years, mostly webforms, because that's just what was available when I got
started. I started tinkering around with Python because I needed a load
testing tool and found an open source one written in python but it needed some
tweaking to work with the viewstate. Anyway, I started learning Python and
Django, built a few little sites and webapps just to try it out (ok, I was
hoping one of them might take off...they didn't) and eventually a Python dev
shop here in town found me on DjangoPeople.net, looked at some of my Django
work, and asked me to come in for an interview. Now I'm hacking Python
(almost) full time, plus side gigs and personal projects, and I couldn't be
happier to only have to look at .NET once in a while.

------
redstripe
I would be worried about the lack of community integration in the asp.net
platform if it was stagnant - but it's not. It's moving forward very rapidly.
I guess he's unhappy that he can't contribute to that progress. I agree, it
would be nice if MS at least reviewed contributions from the community but I
imagine that is something decided by lawyers and not programmers in a company
that size.

Personally I prefer stability in a platform over the exciting ups and downs of
open source projects. I just want to get stuff done. I want my challenges to
be in the code I write and not in maintaining a patchwork machine.

Finally, as a support base I find the .net community to be very good. Just
look at how large and helpful the community on stackoverflow is. Communication
from MS is also pretty good. You would certainly never see Scott Gu pull one
of these: [http://blog.wekeroad.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/dhh-
fu.j...](http://blog.wekeroad.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/dhh-fu.jpg)

------
jswinghammer
I have noticed the lack of community as well but I suppose the choice of using
.Net has more to do with your goals. My company's product uses .Net and I
chose that because I know it best. I didn't really have time to learn
something new when I was trying to get a product to market.

It's a very marketable skill I suppose in certain companies but I've noticed
that few companies I see talked about around here use it much. I mostly see
interest in Ruby, PHP, and Python skills. If you want to start an open source
project then .Net probably isn't your best choice. I haven't met any .Net
developers who work on open source .Net projects. They work on projects in C
or Python on their own but almost never C#. The C# open source projects that
I've used in the past like Lucene .Net are just straight ports from Java.
Lucene is a little frustrating because it doesn't take advantage of many C#
features so it feels like programming Java when you're interacting with it.

------
chrisbaglieri
Personally, it's less the lack of community and more the lack of OSS adoption
as a result of the lack of community that's a hindrance. .NET developers need
to stop drinking Microsoft's Kool-Aid and explore what's out there. If nothing
else, they ought to explore the major ports from the Java world (e.g.
NHibernate, Spring.NET, etc.). .NET developers are effectively slaves to their
tools; don't get me wrong, Visual Studio is an impressive IDE and development
environment but it over-shields. It's shocking how out of their comfort zone
most are with anything that does not start with the letter 'n' or end with the
word 'dotnet'.

I agree with the points made about economics and marketability, but, at least
for me, if you want to stand out from the .NET crowd (in turn making yourself
more marketable), learn something, anything, as long as it's not a first class
citizen on Microsoft's stack. Become familiar with a language other than C# or
(gasp!) VB.NET. Try IronPython or F#; you're still on the CLR! Learn to
appreciate and leverage patterns. The Java community embraces open source, and
as a result, patterns become an integral part of their vocabulary. .NET
developers need to become more proficient in this realm.

~~~
huherto
"The Java community embraces open source, and as a result, patterns become an
integral part of their vocabulary." Generally good advice; but apply good
judgment on using patterns. Learn when to use them and don't go overboard. We
(the java community) are getting bad reputation for overusing patterns.

------
nopal
"Third party vendor support forums are swamped with questions like 'I put a
GridView onto my CallBack control and now I get a ViewState is corrupt error'.
The real answer to this question is not the one supplied: 'this is fixed in
the next version'. The real answer is of course 'STOP USING SO MANY ILL-
CONCEIVED ABSTRACTIONS AND LEARN FROM YOUR PEERS HOW THE #@$#@% WEB WORKS!'."

I've found this to be the case, too, to a surprising degree. I wrote a little
about it here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1120777>

------
Rickasaurus
"Real open source isn’t submitting a patch and waiting/hoping that one day it
might be accepted and merged into the main line."

So the Linux kernel isn't REAL open source then?

~~~
thomas11
OSS projects cannot guarantee to merge any patch they receive, that would mean
disaster. The difference between Linux and MS Codeplex is that if you submit a
patch to the former, it will be discussed in the open and it will be judged on
its technical merit.

~~~
mgkimsal
You don't submit patches _for_ Codeplex - you submit patches to projects
hosted on Codeplex. Some project managers and devs using Codeplex are better
than others at reviewing and taking patches and involvement. So what? Most
projects on Sourceforge are just plain dead, but everything there is 'open
source'.

~~~
thomas11
Sorry, I abbreviated "the projects on Codeplex that are run by Microsoft" as
"Codeplex". That's how I understood the statement of the article where he said
Codeplex wasn't real open source. If a project is under MS' wings, sure you
can submit patches, but they might be rejected for business reasons or simply
because no one cares.

------
liamk
Out of curiosity, are people building their own for-fun-projects using .net or
even Java? All I seem to hear are people using Python, Ruby and Javascript.

~~~
DrJokepu
Yes, .Net is actually a nice environment for hacking. C# is a very good
programming language, the standard library is very well designed, it's fast,
but the what I really like about .Net is how seamless it is to work with
multiple languages at the same time. It's ridiculously easy to write some
parts of the code in F#, others in C# and some others in Python. This way, I
can always chose the best language for each problem without having to use the
same language throughout the whole project.

(I also do a lot of Common Lisp fun coding as well so I'm not exactly a
Microsoft fanboy, just to provide some context).

~~~
bad_user
Some examples would be nice.

------
samstokes
Great paragraph at the end of the article: (emphasis mine)

    
    
        To those who want to be part of a vibrant community of passionate developers
        crafting new and innovative solutions, start hanging out with people who
        *aren’t tied to a particular language or framework*. Get to your local user
        groups. All of them. Get a github account and start forking the hell out of
        everything!

------
pilif
in the very early PHP3 days (around 1998), on the official german PHP mailing
list, somebody once was comparing the ASP (no .NET back then) and PHP
communities.

He said that if he needs help in PHP, somebody will explain the issue and
solve it with them. If he needs help in ASP, he'll get back a price list.

It feels like this hasn't changed over the years.

While I agree that it's nice (and necessary) to be paid for your work, if the
prevalent attitude is to not help unless in the form of paid consulting or a
closed-source software component, a community can't grow because at that point
it gets more advantageous to not share information, but sell it (and forbid
the recipient from sharing it).

That's one of the big points the OP was lamenting and I agree.

~~~
nlawalker
Who is "somebody," and where do they come from?

.Net has tons of community support. The MSDN boards and the blogosphere are
thriving and StackOverflow is extremely .NET friendly. Microsoft sponsors MVPs
and provides tons of free training content and solid (in most cases)
documentation. Product teams and individual architects and developers inside
and outside MS publish blogs, videos, tutorials etc. out the wazoo.

Microsoft charges money for its products and development tools, but their goal
is to get people using their software, and that means getting people to create
software running on their platform. Supporting developers who want to write
software in .NET is in their best interest.

------
djhworld
A lot of enterprise software development suffers from the implementation of
boilerplate code and custom in-house frameworks, I think a lot of businesses
enjoy and value the level of control they can have over their own development
eco-system rather than relying on third party libraries.

------
zentechen
asp.net mvc was a community effort and open source from the every beginning.
It even packed in with jquery javascript library. It can have the same
collaborative community support as any other framework. However, I suspect
that the most of developers are not interested in contributing is because the
learning curve it has for who coming from traditional ASP.NET background.
Among those so-called developers most are contractors who are used to hack up
quick and dirty web applications that aren't scalable in a few years.

On the other hands, we have to give kudos to Microsoft that making things easy
for people with little programming background get off the ground.

------
st3fan
What do people here think of .Net as a choice of platform for startups?

~~~
jimbobimbo
I think it's great. Get BizSpark or WebsiteSpark to cover your licensing costs
during development; start with el-cheapo $20/mo hosting which gives you
reasonable bandwidth and MS SQL option - and you are all set. If three years
down the road (that's how long *Spark lasts) you will find yourself thinking
about licensing costs - you aren't doing it right: in three years of startup
it's either you're getting enough profits to cover your licensing expenses, or
you're in deep trouble no matter what license is.

~~~
latch
I hear this often, but I don't buy it. The implications [seems] to be that
most startups either succeed or fail within 3 years.

Does anyone have proof of this?

My personal observation is that most companies will still be around and
they'll neither be millionaires nor broke. In such a situation, the bizspark
bait-n-switch can be significant.

Picking technology today on the basis that you'll either crash and burn or be
hugely successful in 3 years seems like the sales pitch of a man who lends you
free software for 3 years.

~~~
jimbobimbo
My point is: if you're doing a startup, you want to have a business, not a
hacking hobby. If three years down the road your business isn't generating
enough profit one way or another, it's a "busyness" and you seriously should
consider doing something else.

~~~
regularfry
There's a _lot_ of room in the gap between marginally profitable and
exponential growth. Not every startup is necessarily going to end up making
millions - not within 3 years, 10 years, maybe ever. That doesn't make it a
"busyness," nor does it make it not worth doing.

------
WesleyJohnson
Perhaps off topic, but I've never understood the draw of Microsoft's
implementation of MVC. I've watched a few video tutorials and stepped through
several articles and my initial impressions are that it seems like you're
mixing a lot of code in with the presentation layer, almost like going back to
classic ASP.

We use WinForms at work, and did so at my previous job as well. Perhaps I
defend them because that's what I'm used to and they pay the bills, but I
would argue that their not just for inexperienced guys fresh out of school
that don't understand how the "magic" works. Sure, you can get far with them
without really pulling back the curtain, but use them long enough and delve
deep enough and you get a pretty decent understanding. Or maybe I'm the living
proof of "you don't know, what you don't know".

------
mmphosis
It's in the best interest of Microsoft that governments and government-sized
and super-sized corporations procure systems that need indefinite upgrade$. I
think that it is unfair to _only_ pick on Microsoft because watch as that
aging but curiously mission critical mainframe, Oracle license, and the entire
fleet of Dell, HP, Apple, or fill-in-behemoth-brand-name hardware-software-
network combo is going to need upgrade$ too.

------
diego_moita
I will never understand this. Whenever I look at a programming technology, all
I see is a tool; I just can't see all the moral drama and tragedy this guy
describes. Might be a religious thing. Or I am probably very stupid, like all
the other "M$ slaves",...

------
augustl
This explains the unexpected presence of .Net devs on yesterdays local Ruby
user group meeting!

------
rasyadi
Seems like this is the trend nowadays around the world. Corporate developers
with experience in .NET/Java start doing Python/Ruby or other open source
stuffs. Some of them start learning iOS or Android platform just to start
their own starup.

------
PandaWood
This just seems to be another case of Ruby Racism
<http://forgivingworm.wordpress.com/2010/09/26/ruby-racism/>

------
rodh257
There always seems to be some sort of article that is negative towards such
and such programming language/framework on hacker news, I wonder why that is?

eg, Java is dead Django sucks Leaving .NET

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alaithea
The short time I spent in .NET development felt incredibly disenfranchising,
when the answer to bugs found was always a denial that the bug existed or
"that will be fixed in the next release."

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reymundolopez
But Mono is a totally different story.

