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Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

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Re: Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

#31
post #25
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please explain that?

When you start out, you're designing your site in hopes that someone other than your mom is going to use it. Usually, all you need is an app server and a database. I you get successful, that won't cut it. You usually need to start adding more and more pieces and rethink some technology decisions you made originally.

Thanks!

I think I understand why the initial design/technology decisions would rarely make it to a product that has to be largely scaled. This makes perfect sense for almost all cases.

Do you think that there are technologies that are inherently more scalable than others, so if some body was initially choosing them would stand more chances to scale up in a non painful manner?

Re: Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

#32

> It’s not about the quality of the talent. It’s a simple supply and demand question. Uh oh. "Programmers are a commodity" again.

I was trying to make the point that from my vantage point the talent pools are deep in each camp. Bad choice of words on my part.

Re: Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

#33
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You almost always have to rewrite your whole system anyway to scale to millions of users. It doesn't matter whether it's PHP, Python, C++, or ASP.NET; it'll have to be rewritten. The real problem is the flip-side of something that the OP mentioned as an advantage: ASP.NET coders tend to be cheaper, less experienced, and hence less likely to know about some critical detail that'll boost adoption, whether it's usabilit…

Not if you use http://helma.org (SSJS), it has a build in ORM that caches results. 1 machine 2 GB ram serves 30 million hits per month.

30 million hits/month is only about 11 QPS, which is fairly typical of most dynamic-languages frameworks.

Re: Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

#35

> It’s not about the quality of the talent. It’s a simple supply and demand question. Uh oh. "Programmers are a commodity" again.

I was trying to make the point that from my vantage point the talent pools are deep in each camp. Bad choice of words on my part.

>the talent pools are deep in each camp

That doesn't really matter if in the PHP and .NET world you have to filter through 10,000 people to find somebody of the same median grade as you'd find in haskell/python/ruby/clojure.

I'm exaggerating for effect, but the take-home here is that if you don't have unlimited resources you need to have some way to differentiate and filter from the guys offering the sweet vacation packages and steady career options.

How exactly are you differentiating and filtering for higher quality people if not by technologies and developer freedom?

Do you have nice offices ala 37signals?

Are you an advocate of developer 'rights' such as Joel has been known to enumerate?

Why exactly should a dev tolerate using VisualStudio and Windows for the sake of working on your company?

Re: Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

#36
I think ASP.Net is a pretty smart move even if you do have a strong CS background and know a few other platforms. The basic reason is that Microsoft stuff performs really well and you won't have to worry about a lot of problems for a very long time.

Chances are one or two webservers will handle your page requests for quite some time before you need to start thinking about it. ASP.Net's sessions also work very well with server farms without much work beyond configuration you just need to follow a few rules and it works great.

Assuming you went with SQL Server 2008 then chances are your database is going to perform very well for quite some time. A DBA or consultant can come in when things get tough but any senior level developer who tries to act cool by pretending to be a DBA can keep things moving along until you have cash to pay someone to really make sure things scale well.

Plus no one cares. If your startup is moderately cool getting C# developers won't be tough either. I've met plenty of great C# developers so they're definitely out there.

Re: Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

#37
"I don't know anything about programming, therefore my first choice is best."

Sure, that makes sense.

(It also follows from this logic that cheap programmers are a good thing to have. If you need to do twice as much work, you just hire twice as many programmers! Combined with an IDE, you're sure to succeed!)

Re: Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

#38
post #5

I disagree. For starters, I care what I build my site in. I'd have a lot more fun using say python or (if I'm lucky) lisp or Haskell than I would using PHP. And more fun = easier. Secondly, developers who might join your company are going to care. Developers are more than the technologies on their resumes. Good ones can learn new technologies quickly. And they might even be happier learning something new. This view i…

It does not matter what you build, you can achieve the same with using either PHP, Python, Ruby or ASP.NET. I choose Python/Google App Engine, free hosting is what was important for me, so I learnt a bit of Python to build me sites http://initlabs.com

Re: Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

#39
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I don't get. ASP.NET scales pretty well as Joel opines. Why do people think .NET is bad just because it feels enterprise-y? More: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWHfY_lvKIQ

My beef with ASP.NET is that it makes it disturbingly easy to write code that doesn't scale well and then is ridiculously hard to scale after the fact. It really is all about the initial design not the language. ASP.NET just makes it too easy to go with bad design and library choices, not to mention the tons of examples of bad design that newbies might accidentally follow at the beginning.

My beef with ASP.NET is that it makes it disturbingly easy to write code that doesn't scale well and then is ridiculously hard to scale after the fact.

Explain? Example? I don't see how this could possibly be true for .net but not for Rails or Python or PHP or whatever.

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