5 ms·

I can't agree more with the observations on MVC. It's really a symptom of .Net and Microsoft locking in the vast majority of inexperienced users with overly ab

I can't agree more with the observations on MVC. It's really a symptom of .Net and Microsoft locking in the vast majority of inexperienced users with overly abstract components. Developers fresh out of college who were taught .Net in school and get a job in it become experts at Partial PostBacks and Code Behinds and binding data to the latest whiz-bang GridDataAwesomeControlForTheWin. The problem I've seen time and again is that they have no idea how this is implemented. Ask a green .Net developer about the ViewState lifecycle and see if they know how that really works. I don't mean to disparage all .Net developers or to try and say that being a .Net developer precludes you from ever understanding how these things work. I am trying to say that for a lot of people for whom coding is their 9-5 way to make money, they will never look behind that curtain to better understand their craft. They will believe that Microsoft invented Model View Controller, they will only get exposed to technology at the pace Microsoft cares to expose them to it, and that's a shame. There are probably a lot of 9-5ers who could have that switch flipped and go from code monkey to craftsmen, but they are stuck doing WebForms and have never really got bitten by the curiosity bug in the face of the stale joyless Microsoft platform. Other platforms can be just as dangerous, even RoR has a preponderance of gems that solve common problems in web development that there are probably RoR web devs that have never thought about have you would implement authentication on the web, just slap :acts_as_authenticator_unicorns_rule on the model. It just seems to be a much more pernicious problem in the .Net community and one that grew up out of trying to hide Web Programming and make it Windows Programming rendered in HTML.

dangrossman 16y ago
There are colleges teaching .NET? I'd never heard of that.
- jtdowney 16y ago
  It isn't the first thing they teach you at Purdue but a sizable chunk of CS and CIT students learn C#/.NET
  - arethuza 16y ago
    I remember meeting someone who said "oh yes, we did assembler in our course" - upon being questioned they had been doing .Net CLR instructions. So much for the 6502 assembler I grew up with :-|
  - dangrossman 16y ago
    Interesting. In my CS degree ('08) the languages used in the few classes that involved actual programming were: C++, Scheme, Prolog, Python and Java. Never anything that would require proprietary software like Visual Studio.
    - rbanffy 16y ago
      Consider yourself lucky. A CS degree is not where you learn "market skills". It's where you learn to build the stuff that will define what "market skills" are.
- thecodemonk 16y ago
  There is a college here that starts you out with VB.Net, in the CS track, no less. They learn C++ the semester after that. I wish they would just drop VB.Net and start with C++ then let them take an elective with C# or something...
- squidsoup 16y ago
  Massey University's (massey.ac.nz) introductory computer science papers are all in C#/.Net. I found this surprising as well.
sofuture 16y ago
"There are probably a lot of 9-5ers who could have that switch flipped and go from code monkey to craftsmen, but they are stuck doing WebForms and have never really got bitten by the curiosity bug" That's disingenuous bullshit. Hackers start a lot earlier than "fresh out of college". Disinterested coders aren't lost souls led astray by the ways of .Net, they're disinterested coders; they'd write Ruby with just as little interest. "in the face of the stale joyless Microsoft platform." Thanks for making it worse. The .Net community does labor under the illness/weight of the 9-5 couldn't-care-less crowd, but to turn a community problem into a gross stereotype of the framework only serves to demonstrate your unfamiliarity with .Net. .Net is a rock solid, cool as hell and dynamic/evolving platform. .Net is steered with a much heavier hand than most frameworks, but it makes huge, deliberate moves of evolution (Linq, var/dynamic, PLinq, IronPython/IronRuby/F#, constantly-evolving-C#-syntax).
- jcromartie 16y ago
  LINQ to SQL was killed. IronRuby is terrible. Constantly evolving C# syntax is not inherently a good thing.
  - contextfree 16y ago
    LINQ isn't the same as LINQ to SQL, which is an ORM written on top of the LINQ interfaces. Other ORMs like Entity Framework also use the LINQ interfaces.
  - troygoode 16y ago
    As contextfree says, Linq2Sql is an ORM and Linq is really a set of a few technologies (expression trees, lambdas, anonymous types) originally created FOR Linq2Sql but now used all over the place. An example of non-L2S use of Linq to sort an array of objects: //array of dogs var dogs = new[]{ new Dog{Name = "Bowser", Age = 1, Gender = "M"}, new Dog{Name = "Yoshi", Age = 2, Gender = "M"}, new Dog{Name = "Molly", Age = 2, Gender = "F"} }; //get all male dogs ordered from oldest to youngest var dogs2 = dogs.Where(dog=> dog.Gender == "M").OrderByDescending(dog=> dog.Age); No database access involved.
  - 16y ago
kenjackson 16y ago
I find it absurd that people comment about the "problem of abstractions" is a developer at all. And to even bring up this "problem" in the context of web programming is laughable. The whole web is a pretty huge abstraction, and languages like Ruby and Javascript are way more abstract than something like COM (which is really all about object layout). Lets get this straight. The key is not to have no abstractions. That's just stupid. It's to pick the right abstraction to build on. "The problem I've seen time and again is that they have no idea how this is implemented. Ask a green .Net developer about the ViewState lifecycle and see if they know how that really works." There are lots of stuff I use that I have no idea how it works. And in fact, that's the way it should be. If I'm only using things that I fully understand, I'm probably not moving fast enough. Ask your RoR dev who is using an OS relational store how queries are processed. Nine times out of ten they won't know, despite the fact that they could have looked at the code anytime in the past decade. Actually even give them an hour to go look it up, and you'll still probably get a wrong answer. But you know what, who cares?
DennisP 16y ago
> Partial PostBacks and Code Behinds and binding data to the latest whiz-bang GridDataAwesomeControlForTheWin That's WebForms. I hate it too. MVC makes it all go away.

dangrossman 16y ago

There are colleges teaching .NET? I'd never heard of that.

jtdowney 16y ago
It isn't the first thing they teach you at Purdue but a sizable chunk of CS and CIT students learn C#/.NET
- arethuza 16y ago
  I remember meeting someone who said "oh yes, we did assembler in our course" - upon being questioned they had been doing .Net CLR instructions. So much for the 6502 assembler I grew up with :-|
- dangrossman 16y ago
  Interesting. In my CS degree ('08) the languages used in the few classes that involved actual programming were: C++, Scheme, Prolog, Python and Java. Never anything that would require proprietary software like Visual Studio.
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    Consider yourself lucky. A CS degree is not where you learn "market skills". It's where you learn to build the stuff that will define what "market skills" are.
thecodemonk 16y ago
There is a college here that starts you out with VB.Net, in the CS track, no less. They learn C++ the semester after that. I wish they would just drop VB.Net and start with C++ then let them take an elective with C# or something...
squidsoup 16y ago
Massey University's (massey.ac.nz) introductory computer science papers are all in C#/.Net. I found this surprising as well.

sofuture 16y ago

"There are probably a lot of 9-5ers who could have that switch flipped and go from code monkey to craftsmen, but they are stuck doing WebForms and have never really got bitten by the curiosity bug" That's disingenuous bullshit. Hackers start a lot earlier than "fresh out of college". Disinterested coders aren't lost souls led astray by the ways of .Net, they're disinterested coders; they'd write Ruby with just as little interest. "in the face of the stale joyless Microsoft platform." Thanks for making it worse. The .Net community does labor under the illness/weight of the 9-5 couldn't-care-less crowd, but to turn a community problem into a gross stereotype of the framework only serves to demonstrate your unfamiliarity with .Net. .Net is a rock solid, cool as hell and dynamic/evolving platform. .Net is steered with a much heavier hand than most frameworks, but it makes huge, deliberate moves of evolution (Linq, var/dynamic, PLinq, IronPython/IronRuby/F#, constantly-evolving-C#-syntax).

jcromartie 16y ago
LINQ to SQL was killed. IronRuby is terrible. Constantly evolving C# syntax is not inherently a good thing.
- contextfree 16y ago
  LINQ isn't the same as LINQ to SQL, which is an ORM written on top of the LINQ interfaces. Other ORMs like Entity Framework also use the LINQ interfaces.
- troygoode 16y ago
  As contextfree says, Linq2Sql is an ORM and Linq is really a set of a few technologies (expression trees, lambdas, anonymous types) originally created FOR Linq2Sql but now used all over the place. An example of non-L2S use of Linq to sort an array of objects: //array of dogs var dogs = new[]{ new Dog{Name = "Bowser", Age = 1, Gender = "M"}, new Dog{Name = "Yoshi", Age = 2, Gender = "M"}, new Dog{Name = "Molly", Age = 2, Gender = "F"} }; //get all male dogs ordered from oldest to youngest var dogs2 = dogs.Where(dog=> dog.Gender == "M").OrderByDescending(dog=> dog.Age); No database access involved.
- 16y ago

kenjackson 16y ago

I find it absurd that people comment about the "problem of abstractions" is a developer at all. And to even bring up this "problem" in the context of web programming is laughable. The whole web is a pretty huge abstraction, and languages like Ruby and Javascript are way more abstract than something like COM (which is really all about object layout). Lets get this straight. The key is not to have no abstractions. That's just stupid. It's to pick the right abstraction to build on. "The problem I've seen time and again is that they have no idea how this is implemented. Ask a green .Net developer about the ViewState lifecycle and see if they know how that really works." There are lots of stuff I use that I have no idea how it works. And in fact, that's the way it should be. If I'm only using things that I fully understand, I'm probably not moving fast enough. Ask your RoR dev who is using an OS relational store how queries are processed. Nine times out of ten they won't know, despite the fact that they could have looked at the code anytime in the past decade. Actually even give them an hour to go look it up, and you'll still probably get a wrong answer. But you know what, who cares?

DennisP 16y ago

> Partial PostBacks and Code Behinds and binding data to the latest whiz-bang GridDataAwesomeControlForTheWin That's WebForms. I hate it too. MVC makes it all go away.