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What sounds more attractive to a Hacker type looking to work on a startup? "Come be an effective software engineer in today's new start up and use .NET to chan

by alttab 16y ago

What sounds more attractive to a Hacker type looking to work on a startup? "Come be an effective software engineer in today's new start up and use .NET to change the internet!" or "Laid back atmosphere, free pizza, Ruby and text mate. Let's get at it." MS is a tool set - not technology. Hackers are very opinionated and want to do things their own way. In my experience, .NET, VB, Visual Studio (all while great tools) require you to do things one way, their way. That just doesn't sit well. Then of course there is cost, stigma, lock-in, etc. Start ups are the anti-Microsoft, using it as a platform to build their technology, from a very fundamental level, is dissonant. It certainly is culture shock, and its not going to get any better for Microsoft in these markets. But they don't care, their business isn't designed for it. Microsoft doesn't do consumer products well. If you think about it, the only reason DOS got in front of everyone is because they were able to sell it to IBM.

henrikschroder 16y ago
In my experience, .NET, VB, Visual Studio (all while great tools) require you to do things one way, their way. That is simply not true. However, I agree that breaking out of the MS mold requires more effort than it does for other technologies, and if you couple that with the fact that the overwhelming majority of .Net developers available are unable to do so, then you get a major reason not to do a startup using .Net technologies, it's simply extremely hard to recruit the right people.
kenjackson 16y ago
The CLI is as much a technology as Ruby is, with respective canonical implementations. Now Visual Studio is a tool. But not fundamentally different than a tool like Vi or Emacs. And csc is not fundamentally different than gcc.
DrJokepu 16y ago
> In my experience, .NET, VB, Visual Studio (all while great tools) require you to do things one way, their way. That just doesn't sit well. To be honest, that's not my experience. I've found that .NET gives you a lot of freedom, however things can be indeed easier if you do things the "recommended" way, but there's also an "if that's what you want, you can do it if you think you know what you're doing" mentality as well in the design of the framework. I mean, C# even has pointers which is quite uncommon in similar high-level languages, albeit well hidden so you only get to use them if you really want to. Contrast that to Python's famous "there's only one way to do it" philosophy. Don't get me wrong, I think Python is really great stuff but I think it's unfair to say that .NET (as opposed to Ruby or Python) forces you to do things "one way, their way". If you want to do web development, you can choose between MVC and the (kind of) continuations of WebForms; imperative or functional, direct SQL, LINQ or the Entity Framework etc. - there are a lot of choices to be made.

by alttab 16y ago

henrikschroder 16y ago

In my experience, .NET, VB, Visual Studio (all while great tools) require you to do things one way, their way. That is simply not true. However, I agree that breaking out of the MS mold requires more effort than it does for other technologies, and if you couple that with the fact that the overwhelming majority of .Net developers available are unable to do so, then you get a major reason not to do a startup using .Net technologies, it's simply extremely hard to recruit the right people.

kenjackson 16y ago

The CLI is as much a technology as Ruby is, with respective canonical implementations. Now Visual Studio is a tool. But not fundamentally different than a tool like Vi or Emacs. And csc is not fundamentally different than gcc.

DrJokepu 16y ago

> In my experience, .NET, VB, Visual Studio (all while great tools) require you to do things one way, their way. That just doesn't sit well. To be honest, that's not my experience. I've found that .NET gives you a lot of freedom, however things can be indeed easier if you do things the "recommended" way, but there's also an "if that's what you want, you can do it if you think you know what you're doing" mentality as well in the design of the framework. I mean, C# even has pointers which is quite uncommon in similar high-level languages, albeit well hidden so you only get to use them if you really want to. Contrast that to Python's famous "there's only one way to do it" philosophy. Don't get me wrong, I think Python is really great stuff but I think it's unfair to say that .NET (as opposed to Ruby or Python) forces you to do things "one way, their way". If you want to do web development, you can choose between MVC and the (kind of) continuations of WebForms; imperative or functional, direct SQL, LINQ or the Entity Framework etc. - there are a lot of choices to be made.