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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).

#91
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's my go-to argument when choosing languages. Whenever someone says to use Java or .NET rather than the relatively obscure Ruby (or Node.js or whatever) because that makes it easier to find programmers, I always ask why they want to staff up on average to below average programmers. (Edit: sure there are good ones, just far more bad ones) At least if they use the obscure language, you know that the programmer in q…

You're going to find the full range of talent regardless of which language you're using. Erlang doesn't guarantee godlike competence, and .NET doesn't guarantee mediocrity. I think your biases are showing a little here.

I never said anything about a guarantee. I'm just saying that if you want to hire a programmer, the fact that there are thousands and thousands more of .NET programmers doesn't make hiring any easier. You want quality, not quantity.

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

#92

I feel that the author just didn't try any other technologies. > I found ASP.NET to be unmatched in terms of documentation I find this hard to believe. Again I think the author knows his way around Microsoft products, and is biased towards it. > Hiring quality coders on a bootstrapper’s budget is easier for ASP.NET than it is for anything open source. It just is. I find this statement self-justifying and false. If a…

> I found ASP.NET to be unmatched in terms of documentation I find this hard to believe. Why do you find it hard to believe? ASP.NET is really well documented. Is it absolutely the best documented product in the world, but it is reasonable that someone doing an investigation could reasonably believe that ASP.NET has the best documentation.

I find it hard to believe if the author does not back it up with a lot of research and statistics. If the author would have just said 'it has great documentation' I would have said nothing about it, but when the compares it with others, he should have something to back it up.

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

#93
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"And more fun = easier." That's the thing though - you and I think programming is fun and awesome, whereas this guy thinks business is fun and awesome, and programming is just a means to do what he wants to. What I think is a valuable lesson here though, is that he stayed focused on his goal of "put out the site", whereas with hackers it's easy to have a real goal of "Use technology X and write some awesome code" wit…

Hey, wait a minute. Just what are you trying to say here? That business and technical people do better working together than ignoring each other? Next you'll tell me business people are human beings and not drones some cruel hacker made to torment other hackers.

Oh, if I had a dime for every time an MBA has interrupted and ruined a productive hackathon...

s/MBA/Hacker s/hackathon/sales_meeting

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

#94

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 wi…

By what metric does Microsoft stuff perform really well? You're seriously saying you choose Microsoft for performance and stability? And you have a dozen upvotes?

.NET languages are compiled. The compilers build an intermediate representation (IL, similar to bytecode in languages that use a VM) and they're just-in-time compiled when they're first loaded, so they run as native code. As an aside, one advantage is your assemblies automatically compile to 32- or 64-bit based on your platform, so you get "free" access to +4GB of memory if you're deployed to a 64-bit machine.

Java (for example) and C# benchmarks tend to be close because Java is very mature and, even though it runs on a VM, is highly optimized. It compares favorably with C for this reason.

The MS compilers are very good and Mono is catching up. If you run on Linux, you'll probably be slower than Java in many cases. That will change over time.

Stability is a different question. The stability of C#, F#, etc. is not related to Windows and IIS as platforms. You can run C# based web stacks on Linux.

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

#96
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Only if you assume that hits are evenly distributed throughout the day and throughout the month. Very few sites have that sort of traffic pattern. 30 million hits/month quite likely means peaks of 100 QPS followed by periods of 1 QPS.

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

#97
post #75

"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!)

That's my go-to argument when choosing languages. Whenever someone says to use Java or .NET rather than the relatively obscure Ruby (or Node.js or whatever) because that makes it easier to find programmers, I always ask why they want to staff up on average to below average programmers. (Edit: sure there are good ones, just far more bad ones) At least if they use the obscure language, you know that the programmer in q…

why they want to staff up on average to below average programmers

1. Because they don't want to spend a lot of time looking for developers - it's far easier to find a Java developer than, say, a Ruby developer, simply because there's so many of them. Also, because there is so many of them, in all likelihood they will ask for standard wages whereas a developer with a good knowledge of some lesser known language/technology might ask for a higher pay because he knows his skills are in demand and the employer cannot easily find somebody else with those skills for a lot less money.

2. For certain types of software there is no need to have the best of the best. Average programmers are just fine for working on a standard CRUD application. If you're Google and you're hiring people to work on your search engine, then yes, you want to have the most brilliant minds out there, but if you're a company that just needs somebody to maintain it's CRUD application than you'll do just fine with an average developer, who'll be more than happy to work for standard, average pay.

That being said, it's my opinion that, when hiring developers for work on an enterprise app, it's probably best to hire those that have a good knowledge of some enterprise-proven language like Java or C#, but with an interest in languages such as Scala, Ruby or Python. This way you get the guy that knows his way around an enterprise stack, but that's also not just a drone that considers programming nothing more than a day job, you get somebody who actually likes coding and frequently codes just for the fun of it.

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

#98
post #68

My personal experience is that the MS stack is tough for a startup because Sql Server can get expensive... especially if you want uptime. The feature to rebuild the indexes (without downtime) and do horizontal partitioning requires the enterprise edition... and it retails at 25k/processor. If you go with asp.net consider your budget before choosing sql server.

You can rebuild indexes in-place in even the free versions of SQL Server.

I think he means online indexing http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/cc966402.aspx

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

#99

My personal experience is that the MS stack is tough for a startup because Sql Server can get expensive... especially if you want uptime. The feature to rebuild the indexes (without downtime) and do horizontal partitioning requires the enterprise edition... and it retails at 25k/processor. If you go with asp.net consider your budget before choosing sql server.

Nothing stopping you using another database server - I've started using CouchDB with an ASP.Net MVC application because I wanted documented oriented storage and it works perfectly well.

MySQL seems to have plenty support, as does Oracle etc.

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

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I found ASP.NET to be unmatched in terms of documentation I find this hard to believe. Why do you find it hard to believe? ASP.NET is really well documented. Is it absolutely the best documented product in the world, but it is reasonable that someone doing an investigation could reasonably believe that ASP.NET has the best documentation.

I find it hard to believe if the author does not back it up with a lot of research and statistics. If the author would have just said 'it has great documentation' I would have said nothing about it, but when the compares it with others, he should have something to back it up.

I think calling it "unmatched" is a bit strong, but generally I would say that the documentation of .Net is definitely one of its strong points.
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