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(to be fair, I'd probably do the same thing, and I bet most of us would too)
I'm not saying he shouldn't be excited for a change, but in a couple of years, who knows? Maybe he'll be checking out Haskell, and we'll hear about how great that is.
Dave has some reasonable points, and frankly I think MS is going where he'd like them to go. But he does miss the boat on a few things. One thing that I do think he discounts too much is the surprising effectiveness of small focused teams. In the same way a small startup is more effective than a lumbering machine, a small team of devs is often more effective than 1000 loosely organized volunteers. The classic example…
> The classic example is GCC which has probably 10x > more people working on it than any commercial > compiler, yet the Intel and MS C/C++ compilers > generally kill it. Oh? Interesting; I thought that gcc was one of the better ones. Could you elaborate?
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I agree with you. The languages, documentation, and standard libraries of .NET are awesome. The community is definitely lacking though. These days you can get excellent help on IRC about F# and on stackoverflow for everything, but there is not really a spirit of "lets build something cool" outside of F#.
but there is not really a spirit of "lets build something cool" outside of F#. Can you give an example of something that is cool? Everytime I think of something cool, I can think of something done on the MS stack, but maybe our definitions are different.
Having said that, I couldn't agree more regarding the community. When MVC came out my only excitement about it -- given that I had been doing something better with .NET for closing on a decade -- was that the default baseline would hopefully be better than the terrible abomination that is WebForms (a construct either made to cripple web development, or to hold the hands of Visual Basic developers with a big viewstate diaper). But otherwise the excitement was hard to accept because it wasn't like it was actually something new, or something that you couldn't already do yourself with minimal effort. I'm seeing the same thing with some of the concurrency additions in .NET 4, where some trivial constructs are blessed with some syntactical sugar and it's treated like it's a new revolution in development.
Which brings up another oddity of the .NET community in general: There is a tendency to embrace and vigorously adopt whatever abstraction Microsoft grunts out, regardless of merit or actual value that it adds. The simplest need becomes layers of poorly contrived, poor fitting abstractions, where developers instead of asking "why should I use this?" instead are too busy worrying about "why didn't you use that?" The former question is much more valuable, but the latter is the defensive reaction of too many. LINQ is such a tool that is, in my mind, used for evil far more than good, but because it's a part of the gamut you have to mash it in wherever possible.
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I've been doing development with Rails on personal projects and while Netbeans isn't Visual Studio, it's still a pretty solid development tool. I also dig how the local Rails environment shows you every call that's being made, plenty of solid logging integration, etc. Also the gems and other libraries being open source and freely available is great, and Ruby crushes C# with regards to Metaprogramming if you're going…
ASP/VBScript Are you referring to classic ASP? VS (for .NET) has great debugging features.
Compared to anything except rails, ASP.NET is pretty good. Yes, the viewstate / gridview bs is annoying and should not be used. The problem is primarily that corporate dev departments want interchangeable parts. They want to be able to hire a developer and him to know the API that everyone is using. They don't want magic. They want everything spelled out so that the code looks identical to the UML and identical to th…
Stackoverflow is built in ASP.NET MVC, which is magnitudes better than normal ASP.NET (and ships with Visual Studio 2010).
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but there is not really a spirit of "lets build something cool" outside of F#. Can you give an example of something that is cool? Everytime I think of something cool, I can think of something done on the MS stack, but maybe our definitions are different.
I don't understand what you mean. Do you mean cool F# things? All the work of Tomas Petricek is way cool. Outside of .NET there is of course tons of cool stuff, like Clojure, Rails, Haskell stuff, the recent fuss about Yacc is Dead etc.
I'm trying to see why the things coming out of the Clojure and F# community are cool, but they aren't coming out of the C#/Visual C++ community. For example, ScottGu showed off a C#/Silverlight app built by a 3rd party that was a 3D model of the human body, where you coudl strip layers and interact in real time... all rendering pushed to the GPUs. That seemed cool to me. And they did it in a week.
I'm trying to understand why we have this disconnect.
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I don't understand what you mean. Do you mean cool F# things? All the work of Tomas Petricek is way cool. Outside of .NET there is of course tons of cool stuff, like Clojure, Rails, Haskell stuff, the recent fuss about Yacc is Dead etc.
Just things that are cool. Stuff done in F# or in other communities like the Haskell, Clojure, or Rails community. I'm trying to see why the things coming out of the Clojure and F# community are cool, but they aren't coming out of the C#/Visual C++ community. For example, ScottGu showed off a C#/Silverlight app built by a 3rd party that was a 3D model of the human body, where you coudl strip layers and interact in re…