Why I reckon that a Computer Science generalist mightn’ be a person of a certain airs, who’s just as likely to be talking about an LR parser as he is to take a gander at a design pattern or two. Maybe he’s gonna understand the benefits a using a language that does some a tail recursin’ for a lil of the old divide and conquer and maybe he ain’t ascared of thinking bout his big O. But he ain’t gonna back down from a tool, he’s just gonna learn it real good ta make sure it ain’t just snake oil.

Yessiree, a fella like that, who kin thinka efficiency and ain’t afraid to poke under a skirt or two is just the typea chap who might find himself a livin’ in this wild world.

Now I ain’t saying that no .NET developers is good at what they do, but I’d be just confounded to think that even in them parts data base administration is a Computer Science endeavor. Maybe the administrationator is a implementin his own bit sort buckets and write ahead log, I’m just a simple folk type who ain’t thinkin in them big fancy terms.

The world’s a mighty big place and I’m the kinda type who takes a shinin’ to different tools for different problems, but I do have to take offense at the notion that a big fancy framework like .NET is gonna help me solve my problems. Sometimes you gotta look that calf in the face and make him a steer and sometimes he’s gonna be a bull, but you can’t be fraid to get your hands round his testes, no sir. I’m a type a fella that likes a certain wide open (source) ness to his tools, if he can get em. And iffin I want ta know something, I can downright find it out. Now I ain’t gonna be all like that senor mr stallman, but I do like the cut of his stetson, as they say.

I think I’m just gonna sit back and chew on my thoughts and maybe iffin’ this man has ruffled some feathers, there’s some feathers that a needed rufflin’.

The true power is that newer libraries allow you to completely re-write them if you desire. You are not confined to the way the Microsoft standard. One good example is the the way Microsoft reads the .ASPX files. Many developer have wrote their own engines that out perform Microsoft’s, and Microsoft embraces this. In the MVC Framework you can plug in what ever you want into the different sections. You can use third party engines if you want, or write your own.

Having seen how this baby borned as COM, then grown up to be COM+, .NET 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, 3.5, 4.0 and to be 5.0, I know exactly what the worrect terminology is, and who on the earth has the final say. It’s MS’s baby and they named it a platform. That’s final.

So why did I make this deliberate mistake?

Since I do not work for MS, I decide to be practical and open some minds by stressing the ignored truth: When you start a new app, You do not use .NET without C#, you do not use C# with out .NET. Being a language or a platform is just two sides of the same face.

The main purpose of all other so-called supported languages are glues to existing apps, they are just well-done language bindings in a sense. Mono is just a toy unless MS throws funds in.

It’s also interesting that Java has been trying to be pose the percetion of *a cross-platform language*, in stead of a platform. It succeeds now because there are now 2 implmentationsn with Google’s Dalvik.

.Net’s been trying to sell the idea of being *a cross-languge platform*, even when they have two implementations of one platform(classic .NET and SL). Seems it’s successful too judging from the comments here.

To the the one who boasted everywhere that he’s been programming for 8 years, do you know it takes 10 years to be a good programmer(http://norvig.com/21-days.html), you have 2 year left before graduation.
And there’s an excersice for you, try persuade yourself to understand all the points in my previous comment until you are convinced. Hint: You may try google.com or bing.com or reading the link you provided carefully between the lines and other recent blogs on this VCblog site. No, you do need a dictionary to tell me language and platform are too entries with different interpretations.

Having seen how this baby borned as COM, then grown up to be COM+, .NET 1.0, 1.1, 2.0, 3.5, 4.0 and to be 5.0, I know exactly what the worrect terminology is, and who on the earth has the final say. It’s MS’s baby and they named it a platform. That’s final.

So why did I make this deliberate mistake?

Since I do not work for MS, I decide to be practical and open some minds by stressing the ignored truth: When you start a new app, You do not use .NET without C#, you do not use C# with out .NET. Being a language or a platform is just two sides of the same face.

The main purpose of all other so-called supported languages are glues to existing apps, they are just well-done language bindings in a sense. Mono is just a toy unless MS throws funds in.

It’s also interesting that Java has been trying to be pose the percetion of *a cross-platform language*, in stead of a platform. It succeeds now because there are now 2 implmentationsn with Google’s Dalvik.

.Net’s been trying to sell the idea of being *a cross-languge platform*, even when they have two implementations of one platform(classic .NET and SL). Seems it’s successful too judging from the comments here.

To the the one who boasted everywhere that he’s been programming for 8 years, do you know it takes 10 years to be a good programmer(http://norvig.com/21-days.html), you have 2 year left before graduation.
And there’s an excersice for you, try persuade yourself to understand all the points in my previous comment until you are convinced. Hint: You may try google.com or bing.com for or reading the link you provided carefully between the lines and other recent blogs on this VCblog site. No, you do need a dictionary to tell me language and platform are too entries with different interpretations.

The reason being that the best programmers are going to seek out interesting and challenging projects. They are not going to work on a php web app. They are going to be writing compilers, database servers, web servers, application servers, platforms such as rails, webkit, .net, php….

BTW. Expense reports suck, whether you are filling them out or coding them.

RJ, what ‘truth’ do you find in the original blog post, i find little other than giving the benefit of the doubt that there are a LOT of bad .NET developers out there. but like viruses, if 99% of desktops run Windows, 99% of the viruses target it…so 99% of bad developers live where 99% of the work is being done, not exactly rocket science. there are idiots cutting code in every language out there, the tool doesn’t produce bad code, bad standards, bad anything…it’s almost always the idiot operating the keyboard.

My first programming was BASIC on a TRS-80. I quickly moved to BASIC on a Commodore 64. Then, I learned 6502 assembly. I call it assembly, but I didn’t have an assembler. All I had was a programmer’s reference and a list of 6502 instructions. I wrote programs on a notepad (this was 1984, so the real kind of notepad), and did the assembly to machine language by hand, then “poked” the values into memory and executed the programs. I wrote a racing game this way, complete with interrupt-handling, sprites, and collision detection.

How did I learn ODBC programming? I loaded osql.exe into ntsd and unassembled it and manually converted it to ‘C’ so that I could see how the ODBC APIs were being used.

How did I write a Quakeworld/Quake 2 master server? I sniffed traffic to ID Software’s master server and reverse-engineered the protocol. Then I released it (with John Carmack’s permission) as freeware.

My point? I happen to be an excellent C# programmer who also has in-depth C/C++ and Win32 experience. My knowledge of what goes on “under the covers” makes me able to work around YOUR limitation with making 1.7 oz patties.

Good talent is hard to recruit. Recruiting for specific knowledge is never a good idea. You recruit for raw smarts and ability to quickly learn. Kneecapping yourself by having a bias against anyone who has certain knowledge just hurts you.

For those of us who have spent most of our career “cooking squirrels over a campfire with sharpened sticks” .NET represents “just another technology” and certainly not something to avoid nor a means to tar the backs of a significant section of the developer workforce.

Yes, the barrier to entry for .NET is a lower than other platforms because of how great Microsoft’s tools are at making it easy to deliver common features or behaviours. The side effect of this low barrier is that the “.NET developer” is a many leveled beast. I know many who could code you under the floor before you even cracked open your favourite editor.

I’ve been in the industry for 23 years and still use assembler, C, C++, Perl, Ruby, Java, and C# in anger every day of my working life and I don’t see much difference between any of the technologies; they make some stuff easier, some stuff a little more painful. They are all a different way of doing the same thing.

Perhaps the biggest difference between C#/.NET and the others is the cost to market; who wants to design a system that scales out when every box you need costs a lot of money to license? That IMO is the killer for a startup. Crap coders exist in every technology and even then great leaders can make million dollar products with teams of them.

Perhaps the limitation is closer to home?

C# and J2EE development culture doesn’t think like that. It doesn’t encourage those attributes. And it means that highlighting either one on your resume is a very big warning sign for me with my hiring.

He ABSOLUTELY has a startup wanting to make 1.7 oz McDonald’s burgers out of squirrel meat over a campfire where the developers have to also hunt their own squirrels.

This is so Freudian it’s not funny. The question is not whether or not you are angering the McDonald’s cook union, it is who are you – the squirrel whisperer?