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Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t

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Re: Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t

#3
The culture is so important lately, that it is not only .Net Framework that is getting neglected, also Java. It seems start-ups feel that working with Ruby, Python or PHP is the best way to go for every problem.

But I do believe is cultural. We are building a start-up with several pieces of the service in .Net. And it has been extremely fast for us development wise. We are a team of multidisciplinary developers, and we decided to go with .Net for so many reasons; one of them was speed of development and speed of execution. And it has been great so far.

The weird thing is that we are considering using other technologies for specific problems, like C low level execution, but Ruby hasn't yet been found needed; at least not yet.

We believe that as a developer solving a problem we must choose the best tool for the job, and we believe culturally that is what should be promoted. Ruby, Python, PHP, Asp.Net, C#, Java, C++, Lisp, etc. They are only tools to achieve a goal.

Startups should strive to be problem solvers, not technology evangelists.

Re: Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t

#4

The culture is so important lately, that it is not only .Net Framework that is getting neglected, also Java. It seems start-ups feel that working with Ruby, Python or PHP is the best way to go for every problem. But I do believe is cultural. We are building a start-up with several pieces of the service in .Net. And it has been extremely fast for us development wise. We are a team of multidisciplinary developers, and…

Cultural, depending on your desktop platform. .NET doesn't have an official IDE on any platform than Windows—if you run Linux or Mac, it's too fucking bad.

A lot of people who like *nix are precluded from it, without some sort of major workflow change. After getting excited about OSS languages, it's hard to just dump that and go full-stack Microsoft. Hell, a place I just interviewed at literally has everything through Microsoft that's feasible. IIS to the damn mice. And SourceSafe.

Re: Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t

#6
post #2

"The real reason startups don’t use .NET is based more on culture than technology." Ding ding ding, we have a winner. It's more about which tribe you want to belong to than anything these days.

I've written code in a lot of languages and on a lot of platforms.

I ultimately switched to Python not because I wanted to be part of the cabal of Pythonistas (which I frankly believe is much less 'cool' than Ruby), but because it has exceptional platform coverage, is highly readable - solving a problem I've had working with teams or with old code, and is easy to get up to speed in. Mainly though, it allows me to run my code in the cheapest way possible, and scale for pennies on the dollar compared to .Net.

I love Visual Studio, and I'm more than happy to write .Net code (though I haven't done it in awhile,) but I won't for my personal projects because the resulting product is prohibitively more expensive to run and operate than one built in a variety of other languages.

Re: Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t

#8
As a programmer, would I choose to be a member of a community based on open and free information, one where contributions are open to all of humanity, or a community built to feed the bottom line of a large corporation? Especially considering large profits are possible with with both, why would I choose the latter?

Re: Why Startups Could Use .NET, But Don’t

#9
Programmers may indeed lean toward using PHP, Python, or Ruby because of a cultural influence but I truly believe that the deciding factor is cost. New startups typically can't afford to use .NET because of the expense of licensing IDEs, MSSQL instances, etc.

I do agree that programmers should be generalists so they can quickly adapt to new languages and frameworks.

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