Leaving .Net

Compared to anything except rails, ASP.NET is pretty good.

Yes, the viewstate / gridview bs is annoying and should not be used. The problem is primarily that corporate dev departments want interchangeable parts. They want to be able to hire a developer and him to know the API that everyone is using. They don't want magic. They want everything spelled out so that the code looks identical to the UML and identical to the Use case document as signed off in triplicate by a committee of managers. In corporate dev you get promoted for doing everything to the letter not something new and exciting. I've seen pages with more than 100 checkboxes on them and arranged in a grid, it was like someone when mental with excel putting a checkbox in every cell.

To be honest, if rails were adopted by corporate dev you'd see things like not being allowed to use haml / sass, etc. You'd have a corporate list of approved gems in specific versions that were 3 years old (probably whatever comes with a default install of RedHat)

I'd bet if you look at what Atwood and Spolsky are doing over at StackOverflow on ASP.NET it's probably a reasonable choice of defaults and open source. There are a lot of stupid decisions you can make with .NET and I agree that the community is definitely lacking, but largely it's a mindset issue that stems from the socio-political environment they program in.

At my last job you should have seen the shit show that ensued when someone in management found out the DLLs I was handing off to other teams were written in F#, even though it was the .NET team and not the C# team. Apparently, unbeknownst to me, the largest cause of developers leaving a company is due to being hit by buses, and a dependency on FSharp.Core.dll is just unacceptable and could never be part of the automated build process.

I'm a .NET programmer, and i really don't hold allegiance to any one technology or platform.

There are some good points here, but who cares? The real issue is that Microsoft treats developers as if they were a separate marketing channel -- with promotions, partnerships, walled gardens and the like.

So don't play that game. I'm working in F# on mono, on my own stack. Do I care about branch commits, bad abstractions, onerous licenses or such? Nope, not in the least.

Look, there was a day where you had to take the entire MS stack or leave it. But that day is past. Now you can pick and choose a bit. Sure, not as much as we'd like, but it's still open enough for developers to control their environment.

If you don't like the game Microsoft plays with the development community? Then don't play it. But that doesn't necessarily mean you have to walk away from the entire thing.

I was a .NET dev before Python/Django.

All of this is accurate, and he's wise for leaving .NET

It's just not the environment or kind of people you'd prefer to work with, given better communities and concentrations of driven programmers you could be working with.

I think the core rails team is pretty small and focused. The benefit of it being open source is that an army of people wanting to make a name for themselves are combing over their code to make sure all the I's are dotted and T's are crossed. The quality of Rails obviously doesn't scale with the number of contributors - there are only a few core contributors and a heckuvalot of casual contributors. Makes sense to me.

So it's not about incremental increases in product quality, it's about responding to problems quickly and promoting new core developers from the community, rather than through Microsoft's opaque hiring processes.

I'm relatively new to web development, and I've never worked in an enterprise environment using enterprise software/frameworks, but I honestly cannot understand why anyone given the choice and assuming the cash is the same would choose to go the MS route. I admit naïveté.

His description reads more like an indictment of mediocre enterprise code shops than anything specific to .Net.

It seems self-evident that the farther off the beaten path you go with languages and tools the higher the concentration you'll find of people who care and think deeply about the tools they use.