Ask HN: Why the Microsoft hate?

Many thanks.

> Modern computers (even desktop/laptop) are much more similar to those workstations than to DOS-era consumer PCs.

Absolutely. Current computers are totally unreal, off the tops of the charts, as you noted, well beyond what Sun, SGI, etc. were selling 10-15 years ago. But 10-15 years ago I was using x86 at much lower cost.

> There's the customizability side. You say that you're not in the business of tools, but if you're in the business of making something that almost inherently becomes the business of making tools, because existing tools never fit exactly to your needs. Every serious programmer I've known customizes their environment, and linux makes this easier.

Yes. So far my more important customization is some macros for my favorite text editor, a scripting language, and some utility programs.

You are correct about it being easier to automate command line software than GUI software, and I'm a big fan of text input for programs, especially because it's easier to automate the execution of such programs. I like text data that is easy to parse and have some simple parsing code I keep reusing.

I'm hoping that for automating system management Microsoft has some nice tools and APIs. Some of the Microsoft data centers, e.g., one near Chicago, seem to have acres of servers with just a few people and otherwise run by automation. So, apparently some good automation is doable.

> But you're right that most of the value in linux comes from using it on the server

I didn't try to say that, but I thought it and agree with it. Right: With a big server farm based on Windows, I will likely be sending Redmond big bucks monthly for licenses for Windows Server, SQL Server, Visual Studio.

For more, once the monthly checks to Microsoft really add up, then it will be tempting to hire some programmers with backgrounds in Linux and OSS, refactor my Microsoft code onto Linux and OSS, and drop Microsoft.

Yes, for the intermediate term, I do have my eye on the Microsoft BizSpark program.

> I think this is a red herring. Pick a reasonably popular linux platform at random, or pick a hosting service and go with their default / what they recommend. The fact that you've got a choice shouldn't be a downside.

Well, it seemed to me to be a "downside" due to the risk of my ignorance having me pick a poor Linux distribution. But ...! Right! If some major hosting service and their high end customers are happy with some particular selection from Linux and OSS, then that and a little more investigation may be enough to let me make a solid decision.

> I won't say it doesn't happen, but my experience is that you've got a better chance of finding a high-quality, well-documented library with OSS

Wow. Microsoft's technical writing torques me off. E.g., there is the Microsoft program NTBACKUP for disk space backup and restore. It's cute at least in the sense that it can, apparently much like relational data base, get a consistent backup image of a system while it is running and the files are changing. Cute. And useful.

So, I did my backup/restore planning around NTBACKUP. Then when an install of a new version of SQL Server made my Windows XP boot partition sick and I needed to restore it, the restore wouldn't boot. Huge bummer. Hmm ...? Why? Well, there is an obscure option in NTBACKUP to save the system state. What the heck do they mean by system state? So, this is a classic example of undocumented, undefined, nearly meaningless techno-gibberish. They were talking about the options I had selected in Outlook? My screen size? What the heck?

Well, eventually I found mostly by accident from some other software that actually on the boot partition there is a lot of data called system state. Documented, described some place? Not that I could find. But if want the restored data to be bootable, that is, usable, then when save must must take the option to save system state. We're talking hidden chuck hole in the road here, folks.

So, I ran experiments, installing XP. doing backups and restores, and some days, maybe weeks, later accumulated a lot of experience and evidence and typed in a lot of notes and wrote some scripts and got my usage of NTBACKUP in good shape. Then I reinstalled everything else, set all the options for Outlook, etc., apparently none of that work easy to automate, and, exhausted, frustrated, angry, got back to work. Bummer. Huge, outrageous bummer. That's just one example of many.

> And IMO the official documentation for e.g. python or ruby is much clearer than MS'.

I'm surprised, but there's plenty of room for better VB.NET documentation.

> My experience is that the free support on the internet available for OSS is vastly superior to paid support.

I've heard such things, if only as rumors.

> VB.NET suffers somewhat from the poor reputation of previous variants; it is probably not as bad as all that.

I can believe that; I never used the previous versions. From all I can see, VB.NET is mostly just some VB type syntactic sugar to let people do simple if-then-else, do-while, call-return, try-catch, and some more, and make use of the .NET Framework and the CLR.

> Less structure makes it easier to start a program but harder to maintain and develop it - for a maintainable program you need a language that enforces separation between different layers and makes it very clear which parts of the program can and can't affect other parts of the program. Whereas in the early stages it's very convenient if you can just change everything from everywhere.

Yes. I'm very sensitive to scope of names, dynamic versus static descendancy, e.g., due to my long experience with IBM's PL/I.

There is some name scoping -- think of as semantic nesting -- in VB.NET, and so far I'm happy enough with it.

> At a meta level, you're presumably not going to be writing all the code for long (at least if it's successful), and it sounds like you're not a programming expert yourself.

My problem with being a "programming expert" is the documentation: It appears that in practice mostly people learn by experiments and experience instead of well written documentation, and to me that seems very wasteful. Some years ago much of the documentation was better written.

Actually I've done a lot in software and am familiar enough with what's in Knuth, Ullman, CLRS, Sedgwick, and more, but I am lacking experience with the worlds of Windows Server and Linux, the Microsoft .NET Framework and the CLR, OSS on Linux, relational data base installation, configuration, operations, and management, usage of IDEs, software project tools and management, server farm and network management and automation.

Actually, for the software I need for my Web site to go live, I'm about done. The core of that software stands to remain the core of my business for a long time.

But, right, for various purposes that now seem small or to be done manually, there will be a lot of software written, and I will need a good programming group.

> Hopefully you can at least see the value in using a language for which it is easy to hire skilled programmers; IMO VB.NET is not such a language, though you should of course use your own judgment.

I'm wondering: To me VB.NET seems so easy that, with some decent documentation, anyone should be able to pick it up quickly, and anyone with any experience in programming should be able to learn the language mostly just from a few example programs and a little cheat sheet on a few pages of paper.

My view is that learning VB.NET should be easier than getting good with a good text editor with a good macro language. Net, if a person is good at typing into a good text editor, then learning VB.NET should be fast, fun, and easy.

The challenges in writing significant Web site software are outside the language and in the APIs, e.g., the .NET Framework, ASP.NET, ADO.NET, also in the middle ware, e.g., IIS, SQL Server, and in some issues of system and network management, system security, etc. Heck, just getting a Web page to connect to SQL Server can be more work than learning half of VB.NET. Did I mention that I don't like SQL Server documentation? For those topics, I hope to have some good learning materials and quick courses. My view is that the actual content is not much beyond learning how to cook, say, pancakes, and the main difficulty is just some just horribly badly written documentation. Did I mention horribly badly written? Indeed, I intend to hire mostly bright, well motivated people with good learning abilities and high standards and maybe only small backgrounds in programming and then train them in the detailed technical topics.

As far as I can tell from my software timings, likely revenue from ads as I need to scale, and Microsoft's prices, I should be able to afford Microsoft as I scale.

But at some point, if Microsoft's charges to me are so high I could hire a good team to refactor and convert my code to Linux and OSS, then I could save money. I have to believe that Microsoft has seen that issue before and has responses to it.

I think its (a) because MS has earned decent amount of ire for decades of FUD-tastic practices and (b) like Blackberry, no one is really terribly interested (by comparison to Android/iOS) more than marginally.

Over the past few years I have found myself respecting Microsoft and losing faith in Google. I actually feel bad for Microsoft's missteps, but maybe that is what is making them a more respectable company.

> Greg still doesn't get it. He hasn't seen much of the world outside Microsoft, and still wonders why people don't want Silverlight. Still tells me how WPF is so much better that anything else out there.

Aren't both of those technologies, if not actually dead, certainly not the things that even _Microsoft_ wants people to be using these days?