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Why is there so much hate for .NET?

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Why is there so much hate for .NET?

#1

Post by grexican »

I get why people hate Microsoft and why people would "prefer" not to pay licensing fees for their applications. But do haters realize that you can run .NET on a fully free/OSS stack, in the cloud, AWS, Linux, the works? That question is not rhetorical. Do haters realize that?

I wrote an article about the good aspects of .NET, but it really only attracted other .NET developers. That's mostly my fault because my network is mostly .NET.

Here's the article I wrote. I'd be curious to hear if it helps the argument for pro-.NET (or at least not anti-.NET): http://steppingback.com/dotnet-strong-were-not-who-you-think-we-are/

I do work in .NET, Node, and most recently I started to dabble in Ruby. I'm not against any of those other languages, so I don't want to hear how awesome they are. I want to focus on why people thing .NET is inferior and anyone who uses .NET is ultimately inferior, too.

Comment below on why .NET has such a bad rap. No trolls, please. I'd like to have a real conversation about it.

Re: Why is there so much hate for .NET?

#4

Post by virmundi »

Personally it is because the languages feel like they are written for Visual Studio. So if I was using Mono five years ago, I had essentially VIM. Therefore I didn't do .NET.

Another reason is due to how the stack feels like it's playing catch up. ASP.NET MVC trailed behind multiple libraries in Java. The .NET developers were condescending the whole time. They would rant against MVC. They would extol the virtues of WebForms. The same is true with many other ideas. If something is not part of the official stack, .NET developers ridiculed it. I remember conversations where I recommend a library like log4j. Mocked and told how Windows logging was all I needed.

In the end, so many better things exist for free that I see little reason to use .NET. I can get a good editor from node.org built on eclipse. There are paid ides that do that as well, better and cheaper than VS. Because MS was so closed source and proprietary I'm the past I think they lost the PR battle.

Re: Why is there so much hate for .NET?

#5

Post by dottrap »

"Public Static Void"

Rob Pike (Bell Labs, Plan 9, Google Go) gave this short speech at OSCON 2010 about what's wrong with programming languages, their thinking, and their recent direction, with a lot of focus on C++/Java/C#, and how Go was a response to that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kj5ApnhPAE

Apple Swift seems to share much of the thinking, and the huge enthusiasm for Swift this week suggests developers seem to at least subconsciously recognize there is a problem.

Re: Why is there so much hate for .NET?

#6

Post by grexican »

higherpurpose wrote: post #3

With even Oracle claiming "ownership" over the open source Java, who really knows these days? Especially from an extortionist/litigious company like Microsoft.

So if I'm hearing you, the issue is that .NET, while you might be able to do a free stack today, because MS backs it you're afraid that freedom will go away?

If that's the case, I think it's important to note that .NET is based on the open specification of the CLI. It's like the association between JS and ECMAScript. Also, the open reference license for the source code that MS has (which is how Mono has the base framework libraries for its implementation) are pretty wide-open. It'd be hard for even MS to try to renege on that. So while I doubt that we'll ever see .NET be a paid resource gobbled up by MS, with the open specification of the CLI and the support of Mono, it seems like such a small thing to worry about.

And, even if that is your worry, it still doesn't explain why there's so much hate and disrespect for .NET developers.

I appreciate the response, thanks. I'm not trying to disprove your concern here. Just shedding some light to see if that changes anybody's opinions.

Re: Why is there so much hate for .NET?

#7

Post by rnirnber »

I feel the same way as the author. I got introduced to .NET two years ago at a job. I came from a PHP background. I've come to really appreciate .NET and the CLR, and as a developer, I'm convinced I'm way more productive in .NET. I'm currently building something in Mono outside of my day job, and it's so great to be able to use .NET on linux.

I realize that Microsoft and .NET may not have had that great of a past (WebForms ruined its rep IMHO)...but using the new MVC and EntityFramework...it's clear that .NET is back on the bleeding edge.

Also...most .NET devs like working in .NET because we can be productive in it, but keep in mind--.NET haters--that most of the time we're not the ones that chose the stack...we're just left in a position where hardware/sys-admins/MIS at companies that are still afraid of the cloud are mandating that we have to use Windows and .NET.

Re: Why is there so much hate for .NET?

#8

Post by grexican »

virmundi wrote: post #4

Personally it is because the languages feel like they are written for Visual Studio. So if I was using Mono five years ago, I had essentially VIM. Therefore I didn't do .NET. Another reason is due to how the stack feels like it's playing catch up. ASP.NET MVC trailed behind multiple libraries in Java. The .NET developers were condescending the whole time. They would rant against MVC. They would extol the virtues of W…

You know, I've been using VS for so long and I've gotten it for free for the last 3 years since I'm a startup and a part of their BizSpark program that I hadn't even factored that in. That's a very good point.

My IDE consists of a few paid things that you can get for free elsewhere. I've tried using eclipse, but I'm just not as comfortable. But I'm sure I could get there if I jumped.

Things I pay for: * VS - quit expensive * Visual Assist X - $90'ish a year * PHP for VS - $100'ish (because it was cheaper and more efficient to buy a plugin than learn a new environment)

When I add it all up, I have spent quite a bit on the IDE. I don't necessarily agree that the IDE is being beaten by other IDEs. The extensibility is through the roof and I use a lot of tools that really enhance the "shortcomings" of VS. However, because of the plugins, VS is quite bloated and takes way too long to start up.

One of the best arguments I've seen, thanks for posting.

Re: Why is there so much hate for .NET?

#9

Post by chc »

The Microsoft stack by and large has a very closed ecosystem. You can use it in a free environment, but that is very much not how people actually use it. The .NET ecosystem is huge, but it hardly ever touches the freer ecosystem most languages exist in nowadays. If you use .NET "on a fully free/OSS stack," you're more or less in the wilderness, because the other Microsoft stack people aren't doing what you're doing and neither is everyone not using the Microsoft stack. It's basically a worst-of-both-worlds proposition.

However, I don't believe anybody actually thinks "anyone who uses .NET is ultimately inferior." Anyone who would express their distaste for the Microsoft stack that way is obviously trolling.

Re: Why is there so much hate for .NET?

#10

Post by Cloven »

Microsoft's APIs have traditionally been poorly written, bizarre, late, often built specifically to force vendor lock-in, and seem even now to appear and disappear depending on which group inside Microsoft is favored today.

C# is not a terrible language, but against its direct competitors in the 'safe boring garbage collected enterprise algol VM language' space, it loses on non-Windows platforms to the far-better-supported, much-faster, and much-better-tooled Java, where none of those API problems exist and the platform is, even under Oracle, moderately open.

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