9 ms·

There were already open source MVC web frameworks and an army of .net developers who could have collaborated to make them great but nothing much happened. He i

by mahmud 16y ago

There were already open source MVC web frameworks and an army of .net developers who could have collaborated to make them great but nothing much happened. He is lamenting that the .NET community didn't embrace the pioneering MVC frameworks from the OS community, but waited for Microsoft to deliver its own "blessed" framework. Here is what he is forgetting: Economics. A good chunk of .NET developers are not using the system for the love of hacking. No. These people want to learn marketable skills and get/keep jobs. Whatever MS pushes out is what the market will buy, and hire for. What do you think killed Borland? Certainly not the lack of excellent quality products. Rather, their incompatibility with Microsoft. Even if your engineering is superior to Microsoft's, you can't afford to break rank, since the market will not follow your lead. I went to a D.C. area meeting of early .NET adopters, a group of hardcore MS-specialists working for gur'ment. One of the organizers had a fat .NET book on the table, which he slapped with his palm three times and said: "Gentlemen, this is where the money is at". You could have taken me to a brothel afterwards and wouldn't have felt dirtier. .NET is nice and you can do pretty things with it, but corporate platforms are first and foremost careers and cash-cows for people. The broke mofos are out there hacking on GHC and SBCL.

arethuza 16y ago
I presume GHC is the Glasgow Haskell Compiler and not Guarded Horn Clauses?
- mahmud 16y ago
  Yes.
jacquesm 16y ago
Not only that, if you are a startup that wants to do b2b and you want to sell a product in to that market that will have a tight connection to stuff your clients already run you will be required to use .NET by your customers. Unless you like uphill battles that's the way you'll go eventually. It sucks, but it is the reality of the business environment, web side stuff that is abstracted through some HTTP interface you can build in whatever you please but good luck trying to sneak your locally hosted rails app past the Microsoft only mentality prevalent in plenty of businesses.
- lelele 16y ago
  Customers will not worry about "alien" technologies, unless you sell the latter as such. This is a basic sales principle. Don't ever say you develop applications in Clojure, just say you develop in Java. Clojure is just a Jar, isn't it? Then you are just using a Java library, aren't you? Prototypes usually end up in production, don't they? Then develop such prototypes in an agile language and just make them follow their destiny. What are you doing around Hacker News, if you aren't able to hack the system? EDIT: However, you should also understand when your language of choice just doesn't fit a gray-suited environment, and indeed I think Ruby doesn't. Python does.
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    > Don't ever say you develop applications in Clojure, just say you develop in Java. That would be lying though, and it could get you in to a whole pile of hot water. Such 'technical tricks' may work a few times but eventually you'll have a real problem.
    - gaius 16y ago
      It's a matter of semantics. "A Java application" is perfectly honest. Just like when someone says "a native application" it says nothing about if it was actually written in OCaml.
      - jacquesm 16y ago
        Until the time that HR hires a person to collaborate on your project with 'java' experience and it turns out you wrote your code in clojure. Stuff like that tends to have consequences, especially when there are contracts and liabilities involved.
        gaius 16y ago
        We used to say that Tcl/Tk was a C library with a very complex configuration file ;-)
shin_lao 16y ago
Why making money with programming makes you feel dirty?
- sp332 16y ago
  If I already have a full-time job, and I just want to hack around as a hobby in my spare time, I don't want the language features and runtime to be tied up in the same (probably more) red tape and politicking I have to deal with at my day job. I just want to relax and hack, and if there's money involved, that's a lot less likely to be enjoyable.
  - bruceboughton 16y ago
    The reality is that any reasonably complex endeavour will suffer from this, OSS languages included.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 16y ago
    Then make it enjoyable: the last bit of code I hacked was "for profit" but I told the guy who wanted it to just pay me with a bottle of Patron. He gets the code he wants, I get drunk on good tequila. What's not to love :-)
    - mahmud 16y ago
      How well do you code? I know of a few startups that will happily send you to AA.
      - HeyLaughingBoy 16y ago
        Ha! Thanks, that made my morning :-) Seriously though, he was willing to pay me, but I wasn't comfortable taking money for something I had zero experience with (this was my first time using a Web API). And I could tell he didn't want to feel like he was ripping me off by getting my work (all 45 minutes of it) for free, so we met in the middle and both parties were happy.
- 16y ago
jrockway 16y ago
Actually, quite a few Haskell folks work for Microsoft Research. So it's more like the well-paid Microsoft employees are out there hacking on GHC. The broke mofos are the ones that are working on all that .NET stuff. Working for the government as a low-level programmer is not where the money is at.
- jeffreyg 16y ago
  And there's too much money in consulting for the government as a low-level programmer.
- jewbacca 16y ago
  > Actually, quite a few Haskell folks work for Microsoft Research What is up with that, anyway? Three of the most important people in Haskell -- the originators of the language and primary developers of GHC, and the foremost researchers in functional programming as I've experienced it who aren't employed by universities, Galois or wherever the fuck okmij works -- are employed by Microsoft Research [0] Seems like a very odd place for them to be. Microsoft has absolutely no official relationship with Haskell, but it is the closest thing Haskell has to a patron. I suppose bits of their work are trickling down into C#/LINQ (and VB) at as fast a pace as the ecosystem can absorb it, and it would be unthinkable, inappropriate, and probably disastrous in sociologically interesting ways, for Microsoft to try to push direct Haskell on conservative enterprise. I suppose "they" view it as an obscure research tool, by and for the top talent they retain, granted apparent freedom in their research, to keep a strategic reserve of deep magic. It's more likely that "they" don't think of Haskell at all. ----- Also, while I don't think this strange relationship could be credibly attributed to any calculation of PR or prestige, I'll admit that noticing a sizeable chunk of the best stuff I've read in the field is written by known Microsoft employees has done as much to salve my personal opinion of the brand as their fall from threatening malevolence. It would be interesting to see what it would look like for Microsoft to officially recognize Haskell. [0] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/simonpj/ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/simonmar/ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/emeijer/
  - wrs 16y ago
bbsabelli 16y ago
It sounds like he is annoyed at the community that surrounds asp.net MVC development. There was no mention of money, but not all broke mofos chose to not use asp.net for their web app. I also believe that asp.net would be completely dead for web development without stackoverflow.com. A shame, because C# with Visual Studio is a very nice environment. Lonely (i.e. no community), but nice.
- fiveo 16y ago
  I thought it wasn't that long time ago MS released Powershell and the latest MSBuild? These are necessities to automate some tasks in software development. Have you seen your build.proj file lately? Is it as nice as ANT or Maven? Depending on what your practice style is, Java seems to be far ahead in terms of being agile (excuse me for the buzzword). Of course PHP/Python/Ruby are even better.
  - regularfry 16y ago
    There's also Rake.net.
blub 16y ago
Borland was (almost) killed by its own stupidity. Their RAD tools were miles ahead of anything that MS had, but they got buggier and buggier with each version and their C++ compiler had and still has poor standards compliance. I felt like I had taken a step back productivity-wise with VC++6, but it was solid compared to BCB.
- cubicle67 16y ago
  There's a special place reserved in Hell for the management of Borland, right next to the management of Commodore A large part of their demise was due to their constantly pursuing the enterprise market (they even changed their name to Inprise for a few years) where they were largely ignored and unwanted, while ignoring the indie devs and smaller shops who loved them. In the end their developer tools went from best in class (by a very large margin) to an embarrassing copy of Visual Studio, but not quite as good and a hell of a lot more expensive. Kylix was a bold move though, and could have been something good (it wasn't). For anyone interested, Lazarus is still going; it's a cross platform open source ide heavily inspired by Delphi (version <= 7) http://sourceforge.net/projects/lazarus/files/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/lazarus/files/
  - malkia 16y ago
    I loved and used Turbo Pascal since the 3.0 days - 5.5 was probably my favourite, while 6.0 was real stable (bit bit bigger). Then I started learning Turbo C at the same time (was it 3.0), and TVision, Delphi for Windows. Really cool products, and then Microsoft hired the guy from Borland that was responsible for the Forms Editing and other things in the IDE, and Borland changed their trademarks from the cool Delphi/Turbo/Borland to stupid names like Inprise/Kylix/etc. The Turbo Pascal 3.00 was the smallest IDE ever in the world - 30kb of compiler, editor and libraries :)
    - cubicle67 16y ago
      Yes, Turbo Pascal was one of the most underrated languages ever. Blisteringly fast to run and way faster than C to compile. Clean simple language, native strings (yay!), no need to worry about memory management, pointers etc. Built some pretty good stuff with Delphi, and I think sometimes that there's many cases where Delphi 7 is still one of the most productive desktop development packages of all time, even when compared to the latest Visual Studio. and to those who doubt me - well, I like my rose tinted glasses, and I'm keeping them on :P
d4nt 16y ago
I agree, but would add this. Microsoft's (development) tools have never had any underlying principles other than: enabling people with minimal knowledge to get stuff done. Thinking back through MFC, COM, VB v1-6, Access, SharePoint, WebForms and ADO.NET, none of them were characterised by any particular architectural purity or design aesthetic. But they enabled a generation of corporate developers to hack stuff together quickly (I know MFC and COM aren't all that easy but they were easier than just using the WinAPI). Which is why businesses liked the Microsoft stack and hence 9-5 developers flock to them. What's interesting is that in recent years Microsoft has been infiltrated by other schools of thought. It's like there's a three way war going on. On the one hand there are VB.NET people using WebForms, EntityFramework, VSS and SharePoint to hack together stuff that will be thrown away in 2 years. The TFS, SQL Server, BizTalk and Dynamics people want to bring in some enterprise style rigour to the whole thing. While the C#, Linq, MVC crowd are trying to keep everything loose and open. I doubt this is any kind of conspiracy to retain mindshare. It's just that Microsoft got big and Bill Gates started stepping back, so it lost much of it's direction. I sense a real but rarely articulated confusion among the 9-5 developers about all this new stuff. There are 3x the number of frameworks and tools coming out of Microsoft these days, which ones will all the enterprise recruiters be looking for in 2 years? Nobody knows.
- smiler 16y ago
  This. Right now, as a .NET developer myself, it is impossible to keep up with all the new frameworks that Microsoft are releasing.
  - nkohari 16y ago
    Hint: you don't need to. Use what works for you.
    - phaedrus 16y ago
      I disagree. Or at least, you will cause problems for other people. One of my coworkers was delivered a Windows app by a third party - it was written using MFC. I said, "Seriously? In 2010, MFC? MFC was bad even before it became obsolete." My coworker said, "They used it once before and decided it works for them, so that's what they use." Here's the thing: part of being a developer is keeping up to date. If you find one thing that works for you and don't ever update you are not doing your job.
gbowyer 16y ago
"You could have taken me to a brothel afterwards and wouldn't have felt dirtier." Thats the quote of the day !
- recoiledsnake 16y ago
  Many feel the same way about the 'my shit doesn't smell' attitude coming from 37Signals, the _creators_ of RoR, not just a random user like in this case.
palish 16y ago
Speaking of SBCL, I really wish someone would make SBCL stable on Windows. Please. (Windows XP, Vista, and 7. Don't even worry about 64-bit right now, just get 32-bit fully functional and stable.)
- mahmud 16y ago
  OT, but here: http://clgtk2.wordpress.com/2010/09/16/related-project-sbcl-win32-threads/ http://clgtk2.wordpress.com/2010/09/16/related-project-sbcl-...

by mahmud 16y ago

arethuza 16y ago

I presume GHC is the Glasgow Haskell Compiler and not Guarded Horn Clauses?

mahmud 16y ago
Yes.

jacquesm 16y ago

Not only that, if you are a startup that wants to do b2b and you want to sell a product in to that market that will have a tight connection to stuff your clients already run you will be required to use .NET by your customers. Unless you like uphill battles that's the way you'll go eventually. It sucks, but it is the reality of the business environment, web side stuff that is abstracted through some HTTP interface you can build in whatever you please but good luck trying to sneak your locally hosted rails app past the Microsoft only mentality prevalent in plenty of businesses.

lelele 16y ago
Customers will not worry about "alien" technologies, unless you sell the latter as such. This is a basic sales principle. Don't ever say you develop applications in Clojure, just say you develop in Java. Clojure is just a Jar, isn't it? Then you are just using a Java library, aren't you? Prototypes usually end up in production, don't they? Then develop such prototypes in an agile language and just make them follow their destiny. What are you doing around Hacker News, if you aren't able to hack the system? EDIT: However, you should also understand when your language of choice just doesn't fit a gray-suited environment, and indeed I think Ruby doesn't. Python does.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  > Don't ever say you develop applications in Clojure, just say you develop in Java. That would be lying though, and it could get you in to a whole pile of hot water. Such 'technical tricks' may work a few times but eventually you'll have a real problem.
  - gaius 16y ago
    It's a matter of semantics. "A Java application" is perfectly honest. Just like when someone says "a native application" it says nothing about if it was actually written in OCaml.
    - jacquesm 16y ago
      Until the time that HR hires a person to collaborate on your project with 'java' experience and it turns out you wrote your code in clojure. Stuff like that tends to have consequences, especially when there are contracts and liabilities involved.
      - gaius 16y ago
        We used to say that Tcl/Tk was a C library with a very complex configuration file ;-)

shin_lao 16y ago

Why making money with programming makes you feel dirty?

sp332 16y ago
If I already have a full-time job, and I just want to hack around as a hobby in my spare time, I don't want the language features and runtime to be tied up in the same (probably more) red tape and politicking I have to deal with at my day job. I just want to relax and hack, and if there's money involved, that's a lot less likely to be enjoyable.
- bruceboughton 16y ago
  The reality is that any reasonably complex endeavour will suffer from this, OSS languages included.
- HeyLaughingBoy 16y ago
  Then make it enjoyable: the last bit of code I hacked was "for profit" but I told the guy who wanted it to just pay me with a bottle of Patron. He gets the code he wants, I get drunk on good tequila. What's not to love :-)
  - mahmud 16y ago
    How well do you code? I know of a few startups that will happily send you to AA.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 16y ago
      Ha! Thanks, that made my morning :-) Seriously though, he was willing to pay me, but I wasn't comfortable taking money for something I had zero experience with (this was my first time using a Web API). And I could tell he didn't want to feel like he was ripping me off by getting my work (all 45 minutes of it) for free, so we met in the middle and both parties were happy.
16y ago

jrockway 16y ago

Actually, quite a few Haskell folks work for Microsoft Research. So it's more like the well-paid Microsoft employees are out there hacking on GHC. The broke mofos are the ones that are working on all that .NET stuff. Working for the government as a low-level programmer is not where the money is at.

jeffreyg 16y ago
And there's too much money in consulting for the government as a low-level programmer.
jewbacca 16y ago
> Actually, quite a few Haskell folks work for Microsoft Research What is up with that, anyway? Three of the most important people in Haskell -- the originators of the language and primary developers of GHC, and the foremost researchers in functional programming as I've experienced it who aren't employed by universities, Galois or wherever the fuck okmij works -- are employed by Microsoft Research [0] Seems like a very odd place for them to be. Microsoft has absolutely no official relationship with Haskell, but it is the closest thing Haskell has to a patron. I suppose bits of their work are trickling down into C#/LINQ (and VB) at as fast a pace as the ecosystem can absorb it, and it would be unthinkable, inappropriate, and probably disastrous in sociologically interesting ways, for Microsoft to try to push direct Haskell on conservative enterprise. I suppose "they" view it as an obscure research tool, by and for the top talent they retain, granted apparent freedom in their research, to keep a strategic reserve of deep magic. It's more likely that "they" don't think of Haskell at all. ----- Also, while I don't think this strange relationship could be credibly attributed to any calculation of PR or prestige, I'll admit that noticing a sizeable chunk of the best stuff I've read in the field is written by known Microsoft employees has done as much to salve my personal opinion of the brand as their fall from threatening malevolence. It would be interesting to see what it would look like for Microsoft to officially recognize Haskell. [0] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/simonpj/ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/simonmar/ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/emeijer/
- wrs 16y ago

bbsabelli 16y ago

It sounds like he is annoyed at the community that surrounds asp.net MVC development. There was no mention of money, but not all broke mofos chose to not use asp.net for their web app. I also believe that asp.net would be completely dead for web development without stackoverflow.com. A shame, because C# with Visual Studio is a very nice environment. Lonely (i.e. no community), but nice.

fiveo 16y ago
I thought it wasn't that long time ago MS released Powershell and the latest MSBuild? These are necessities to automate some tasks in software development. Have you seen your build.proj file lately? Is it as nice as ANT or Maven? Depending on what your practice style is, Java seems to be far ahead in terms of being agile (excuse me for the buzzword). Of course PHP/Python/Ruby are even better.
- regularfry 16y ago
  There's also Rake.net.

blub 16y ago

Borland was (almost) killed by its own stupidity. Their RAD tools were miles ahead of anything that MS had, but they got buggier and buggier with each version and their C++ compiler had and still has poor standards compliance. I felt like I had taken a step back productivity-wise with VC++6, but it was solid compared to BCB.

cubicle67 16y ago
There's a special place reserved in Hell for the management of Borland, right next to the management of Commodore A large part of their demise was due to their constantly pursuing the enterprise market (they even changed their name to Inprise for a few years) where they were largely ignored and unwanted, while ignoring the indie devs and smaller shops who loved them. In the end their developer tools went from best in class (by a very large margin) to an embarrassing copy of Visual Studio, but not quite as good and a hell of a lot more expensive. Kylix was a bold move though, and could have been something good (it wasn't). For anyone interested, Lazarus is still going; it's a cross platform open source ide heavily inspired by Delphi (version <= 7) http://sourceforge.net/projects/lazarus/files/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/lazarus/files/
- malkia 16y ago
  I loved and used Turbo Pascal since the 3.0 days - 5.5 was probably my favourite, while 6.0 was real stable (bit bit bigger). Then I started learning Turbo C at the same time (was it 3.0), and TVision, Delphi for Windows. Really cool products, and then Microsoft hired the guy from Borland that was responsible for the Forms Editing and other things in the IDE, and Borland changed their trademarks from the cool Delphi/Turbo/Borland to stupid names like Inprise/Kylix/etc. The Turbo Pascal 3.00 was the smallest IDE ever in the world - 30kb of compiler, editor and libraries :)
  - cubicle67 16y ago
    Yes, Turbo Pascal was one of the most underrated languages ever. Blisteringly fast to run and way faster than C to compile. Clean simple language, native strings (yay!), no need to worry about memory management, pointers etc. Built some pretty good stuff with Delphi, and I think sometimes that there's many cases where Delphi 7 is still one of the most productive desktop development packages of all time, even when compared to the latest Visual Studio. and to those who doubt me - well, I like my rose tinted glasses, and I'm keeping them on :P

d4nt 16y ago

I agree, but would add this. Microsoft's (development) tools have never had any underlying principles other than: enabling people with minimal knowledge to get stuff done. Thinking back through MFC, COM, VB v1-6, Access, SharePoint, WebForms and ADO.NET, none of them were characterised by any particular architectural purity or design aesthetic. But they enabled a generation of corporate developers to hack stuff together quickly (I know MFC and COM aren't all that easy but they were easier than just using the WinAPI). Which is why businesses liked the Microsoft stack and hence 9-5 developers flock to them. What's interesting is that in recent years Microsoft has been infiltrated by other schools of thought. It's like there's a three way war going on. On the one hand there are VB.NET people using WebForms, EntityFramework, VSS and SharePoint to hack together stuff that will be thrown away in 2 years. The TFS, SQL Server, BizTalk and Dynamics people want to bring in some enterprise style rigour to the whole thing. While the C#, Linq, MVC crowd are trying to keep everything loose and open. I doubt this is any kind of conspiracy to retain mindshare. It's just that Microsoft got big and Bill Gates started stepping back, so it lost much of it's direction. I sense a real but rarely articulated confusion among the 9-5 developers about all this new stuff. There are 3x the number of frameworks and tools coming out of Microsoft these days, which ones will all the enterprise recruiters be looking for in 2 years? Nobody knows.

smiler 16y ago
This. Right now, as a .NET developer myself, it is impossible to keep up with all the new frameworks that Microsoft are releasing.
- nkohari 16y ago
  Hint: you don't need to. Use what works for you.
  - phaedrus 16y ago
    I disagree. Or at least, you will cause problems for other people. One of my coworkers was delivered a Windows app by a third party - it was written using MFC. I said, "Seriously? In 2010, MFC? MFC was bad even before it became obsolete." My coworker said, "They used it once before and decided it works for them, so that's what they use." Here's the thing: part of being a developer is keeping up to date. If you find one thing that works for you and don't ever update you are not doing your job.

gbowyer 16y ago

"You could have taken me to a brothel afterwards and wouldn't have felt dirtier." Thats the quote of the day !

recoiledsnake 16y ago
Many feel the same way about the 'my shit doesn't smell' attitude coming from 37Signals, the _creators_ of RoR, not just a random user like in this case.

palish 16y ago

Speaking of SBCL, I really wish someone would make SBCL stable on Windows. Please. (Windows XP, Vista, and 7. Don't even worry about 64-bit right now, just get 32-bit fully functional and stable.)

mahmud 16y ago
OT, but here: http://clgtk2.wordpress.com/2010/09/16/related-project-sbcl-win32-threads/ http://clgtk2.wordpress.com/2010/09/16/related-project-sbcl-...