Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Building a Startup - Defending .NET

nashcoding.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 89 posts

Re: Building a Startup - Defending .NET

#21

Post by tansey »

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 the Dojo with an Acer laptop. You can just feel people judging you. ;)

Re: Building a Startup - Defending .NET

#22

Post by jschrf »

bdclimber14 wrote: post #15
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.

When I switched from .net MVC to Rails after a few years with Microsoft, my biggest pain was from missing VS. Rock solid variable renaming, autocompletion and method look up saved so much time.

I use Eclipse a lot, as well as a sprinkling of other IDEs. I tend miss autocompletion too (support for generics and polymorphism? yes please) but the thing I tend to miss the most is the debugger. Nothing else even comes close.

Re: Building a Startup - Defending .NET

#23

Post by bdclimber14 »

jschrf wrote: post #22
bdclimber14 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I switched from .net MVC to Rails after a few years with Microsoft, my biggest pain was from missing VS. Rock solid variable renaming, autocompletion and method look up saved so much time.

I use Eclipse a lot, as well as a sprinkling of other IDEs. I tend miss autocompletion too (support for generics and polymorphism? yes please) but the thing I tend to miss the most is the debugger. Nothing else even comes close.

Well, I don't agree about polymorphism (but that's a whole different conversation) :) I forgot about the integrated debugger though. I sure do miss variable inspection without littering code with puts.

Re: Building a Startup - Defending .NET

#24

Post by bkaid »

vyrotek wrote: post #16
tansey wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> was invited to Redmond to meet the dev teams as part of an early adopter program. I think that's the problem I see with Azure. AppHarbor needs no early adopter program. It's great for the same reason that Heroku and Rails were great for people: if you want to get an MVP up and running, it's almost instantaneous. I want to focus on my core product first and delay thinking about seriously scaling and the other major…

In their defense, Azure's target is not startups or 'hackers' with a toy app. In fact, it makes no sense at all pricing-wise if you only run a single webserver and database. Their pricing covers a large and growing set of features. Microsoft's programs exist because of the insane amount of features and support that have to go into their products for their enterprise customers. And its those features that really make…

Azure can make sense pricing wise for startups that have been accepted into their Bizspark program (which doesn't take much). Bizspark gives basically a single web server and database free and you can easily scale from there if you are willing to pay.

On the downside, deploying to Azure is a bit of a pain and its 15-20 minutes per deployment gets old, especially early on when you are deploying more often.

Re: Building a Startup - Defending .NET

#25

Post by mindcrime »

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.

And? Unless you're trying to sell them something, who gives a rats-ass what they think? :-)

Re: Building a Startup - Defending .NET

#26

Post by latch »

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.

Re: Building a Startup - Defending .NET

#27

Post by denysonique »

ASP.net MVC is maybe quite similar to Rails (it actually is 'inspired by it' i.e. a rip off). But the difference between .NET and Ruby is that Ruby has a culture of hackers, and most of the innovative things re web dev are born in Ruby e.g. Haml, Capistrano etc,and then get ported to other langs e.g. { :Haml => 'PHaml', :Rails => ['many PHP frameworks', 'ASP.net MVC'], :Capistrano => 'Fabric' }

Re: Building a Startup - Defending .NET

#28

Post by nickbp »

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…

You'll be much better off if you're well-practiced in ignoring those people. I think choosing your tools solely out of trends and peer pressure would also send a message, but it wouldn't be a favorable one.

Re: Building a Startup - Defending .NET

#29

Post by charlieflowers »

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.

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 I see in C# (and clearly this is my own subjective opinion) is that I now believe dynamically (duck) typed languages are so much more empowering than strongly typed ones. To me, it seems you can get so much more done, faster, and you choose where to expend your energy to get "automated correctness". But even there, C# has the new "dynamic" keyword that allows for duck typing, so it is moving in the right direction.

Re: Building a Startup - Defending .NET

#30

Post by charlieflowers »

charlieflowers wrote: post #29
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.

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 :)
Post reply on HN