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Building a Startup - Defending .NET

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Re: Building a Startup - Defending .NET

#41

Post by callumjones »

I don't think many people actually dislike the .Net family but it's more the parent company of .Net that causes a lot of dislike to filter down onto ASP.Net and C#.

I have this weird twisted hatred with Microsoft. I think .Net is great but as an iOS dev working inside a Microsoft based team I've founded solutions such as TFS to be just terrible lock ins.

I'd probably love Microsoft more if just this once they would of assessed the current source control versions, chosen a popular standard (Git) and then deeply integrated it into VS. What they instead did was give you TFS with a lack of client end Rest API documentation and wrote a terrible cross platform command line tool. You didn't see Apple creating XSourceControl.

Re: Building a Startup - Defending .NET

#42

Post by notJim »

Hominem wrote: post #34
jschrf wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that article is full of all sorts of stupid. Someone should tell the author that .NET is not a language (not that it'll make a difference). I find this part particularly hilarious: "However, if you need to make a 1.7 oz burger, you simply can’t. There’s no button for it. The patties are pre-formed in the wrong size. They start out frozen so they can’t be smushed up and reformed, and the thawing machine is so tig…

I had a lot of problems with that article as well. But I'd still like the give the author the benefit of the doubt. I assume he has very narrow experience with some framework like webforms or ran into some developers who did. With a lot of microsoft's frameworks it is easy to get stuck at a simple problem with no obvious solution, and conclude that there is no possible way to do it within that framework. Most of the…

I've had a lot of the problems of the sort that you describe (particularly with ASP.Net MVC), and I've found that while there are always solutions, the solutions are often very difficult to find. And even harder to find (at least for my company) are people who have the experience to already know what those solutions are.

Re: Building a Startup - Defending .NET

#43

Post by jrockway »

tansey wrote: post #21
nickbp wrote: post #9

As far as I can tell the author's reasons for deciding to use C# can be summed up as "I'm used to it from previous work, and some useful libraries related to my project are available." Those are perfectly valid reasons, but they aren't really much use to anyone who doesn't share those circumstances, and don't really have anything to do with upsides and downsides of the language itself. That would have been far more r…

> Also, "I'm buying a MBP" translates to "I'm serious about startups"? Well, that was tongue in cheek. But really, just the opposite-- I'm saying that I'm a total tool who's caved in to the trendy peer pressure of the startup culture. That culture shuns .NET on principal and there's lots of pressure to never use it for a startup. And if you don't believe there's peer pressure to use a MBP, try going to Red Rock or th…

And if you don't believe there's peer pressure to use a MBP, try going to Red Rock or the Dojo with an Acer laptop. You can just feel people judging you.

Try going to something that's a bit more unixy and it's just the opposite: you can feel people judging you when you pull out your MBP. Pull out an iPad and you may be asked to leave :)

Re: Building a Startup - Defending .NET

#44

Post by afsina »

I object the "VS" is the best IDE statement. For C#, maybe that is true. But I used Intellij IDEA and VS. VS still looks like glorified notepad against IDEA. I think most developers are living under their language bubble. Also, unlike ruby-python, C# and Java are IDE languages. You cannot program without one.

Re: Building a Startup - Defending .NET

#45

Post by Dn_Ab »

charlieflowers wrote: post #30
charlieflowers wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true. .NET, and C# especially, is one of the few things Microsoft really got right. Anders H is a genius -- he showed it when he did Turbo Pascal, he showed it with Delphi, and he continues to show it with every new release of C#. Did you know that C# has: lambdas, closures, optional duck typing, first-class functions, better generics than Java, and type inference that is sometimes spooky? Really, the only flaw…

Oh, one other flaw -- C# isn't homoiconic. But every other language but you-know-what fails that one :)

Prolog is another that passes. The Pure language - interpreted but not compiled - should count. Compile time self modification is still there though. In terms of macros for code generation, syntactic extensibility, runtime+compile time reflection and staged computation without homoiconicity; Nemerle is one on .NET.

C# is one step closer with its upcoming compiler as a service. Available in mono now.

Re: Building a Startup - Defending .NET

#46

Post by bad_user »

jschrf wrote: post #8

.NET is great. It's fast, clean, and the framework libs are incredibly good. C#, IronPython, and F# are amazing. I still haven't found an IDE that compares to VS in terms of productivity and usability. Despite all the things going for it, it's decidely un-trendy and people hate on it. I'm guessing it's primarily because it's from Microsoft. Software trends are silly.

    .NET is great. It's fast, clean, and the 
    framework libs are incredibly good.
Having worked with .NET, I beg to differ -- .NET framework libs are a mess.

    C#, IronPython, and F# are amazing.
It's not the languages that keep people away from .NET -- to put it simply -- community, tools, price.

Microsoft does a good job at playing catch-up, but unfortunately (for them) when it comes to web development, innovation happens somewhere else.

And sure, Visual Studio compensates for a lot, but it's just an IDE, the least important part of the stack.

Re: Building a Startup - Defending .NET

#47

Post by NetMonkey »

latch wrote: post #26
wriq wrote: post #13

Existing expertise If the goal is to get to a minimum viable product quickly (like most startups) then existing knowledge is a pretty good reason to go with a certain stack. He even mentions having the main algorithm already implemented in C# so at that point it's pretty much no contest. He can always go the route similar to StackExchange in using Linux & Open Source on utility servers (Caching/Load Balancing) and ke…

How far do you take it though? What if someone knows c+cgi? I forget the exact quote, but something along the lines of 30 years experience doesn't mean much if it's the same year 30 times .

Everything in life is a trade-off. And the 30 x 1 years quote nicely illustrates why you should always strive to learn new things.

However, if you already know how to do something well in one particular stack, then you should just stick with that if the objective is to ship.

The operative word is of course that you know you can do it well in that stack. If you start thinking "there has to be a better way" then you should seriously look into alternative stacks or whether you are using your current one correctly.

Re: Building a Startup - Defending .NET

#48

Post by fkcek »

Hominem wrote: post #31

I see some of the .net hate starting to seep into the corporate world as well. I work as a .net developer for a very large corporation and there is more and more talk of re-implementing production applications in Python. The perceived problem is poor code quality. It is an uphill battle to convince people that this problem is not going to be fixed by switching to Ruby if we continue to produce code by lowest bid. I t…

This is what pg called "The Python Paradox"

http://paulgraham.com/pypar.html

Re: Building a Startup - Defending .NET

#49

Post by StrawberryFrog »

vyrotek wrote: post #5

We've had our share of surprised faces when we told people our company is based on .Net as well. There were a lot of reasons for us to use the Microsoft stack. One of them was also existing expertise . My CoFounder and I previously worked as C# developers for years before working on IActionable.com full-time. And yes, Visual Studio is that awesome. "AppHarbor - It's Heroku for .NET. You simply can't beat it." I agree…

And yes, Visual Studio is that awesome

To me, that's only true once you have Resharper installed too,

Re: Building a Startup - Defending .NET

#50

Post by StrawberryFrog »

callumjones wrote: post #41

I don't think many people actually dislike the .Net family but it's more the parent company of .Net that causes a lot of dislike to filter down onto ASP.Net and C#. I have this weird twisted hatred with Microsoft. I think .Net is great but as an iOS dev working inside a Microsoft based team I've founded solutions such as TFS to be just terrible lock ins. I'd probably love Microsoft more if just this once they would o…

a Microsoft based team I've founded solutions such as TFS to be just terrible lock ins.

The majority of .net development that I have seen is not done on TFS. I've used many source control sustems for .Net code.

SVN is far more common. a ".Net dev shop" is far from being the same thing as "a Microsoft only" shop. Typically you see software in use like NUnut, SVN, jQuery, Castle Windsor, TeamCity, Resharper, etc. If you're lucky, you may even get Git or Mercurual.

MS could not have standardised on Git even if they'd wanted to - TFS pre-dates Git by a few years. The driver for MS making TFS was two-fold:

1) get people off MS's previous source control system, SourceSafe, which dates back to about 1995. And it shows. SourceSafe is one of the few version control systems that I do not hesitate to say "avoid! Run! Use anything else!" about. TFS is actually a large improvement.

2) To try to prevent them from going to SVN instead, which was the new thing then. Since SVN is lightweight and free, so TFS took the opposite route of being heavyweight, kitchen-sink, ALM, etc.

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