8 ms·
Microsoft - Goodbye To All That...
- daviding 16y agoProbably old news for a lot of people here, but a cathartic piece for me to write. It's hard not to come across as partisan, but it's a great time to be in software.
- redstripe 16y agoWhy is it cathartic? Are you angry? Do you feel victimized or held hostage? Maybe you should have written more about your feelings. Anyway, you make points that I can sympathize with but I don't understand some of it. Why do people have such a visceral dislike of licensing costs? Presumably most HN people want to eventually build a start up that charges people money for a software service. People here are often quite indignant when someone complains a service costs too much. Yet MS is somehow bad for making money. Personally I find most of their pricing to be reasonable (in some cases that's no doubt thanks to pressure from free alternatives). Also why do people always write these goodbyes and feel they have to cast off everything from MS forever? These proclamations are just strange. Let it be known to everyone that I'm never having apple flavored jolly ranchers again! Seriously, think of MS as just another shop in the bazaar.
- bad_user 16y agoWhy do people have such a visceral dislike of licensing costs? Some people are like that, sure, but that's a loud minority of idiots. For me it's not a dislike for licensing costs, but a preference for free of charge; like all people I like a good deal when I see one. Not to mention that most software requiring licensing costs also has additional handicaps, like not being able to look at the source code or fix it; which is really necessary sometimes, especially when your company is in the software business.
- daviding 16y agoI should add that when I worked for others then license costs seemed more ok and a little more abstract. Now I pay wages then I'm less keen on those SQL server per processor costs. I hope what I wrote in the blog didn't come across as visceral anti anything, especially making or spending money.
- rbanffy 16y ago> but a preference for free of charge I like tools I can inspect or modify and improve upon. the fact they are also, most of the time, free of charge, is an incredible bonus.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- kenjackson 16y agoNice post. I almost completely agree with it. The license cost point is a good one. I actually think it is kind of sad that software as a profession is all becoming enterprise software. No offense, but look at almost all of the YC projects... they're all things that I frankly would have had virtually no interest in coding as a kid. It all looks CRUD apps with the word "social" in the pitch. But I think the profession has become one where software is marginalized, and you make money off of everything else. It's like music. No one wants to pay you for the music -- you have to make money selling t-shirts. And then we have threads where people are surprised to see people say, "I just need a programmer".
- philwelch 16y agoThe license cost point is a good one. I actually think it is kind of sad that software as a profession is all becoming enterprise software. No offense, but look at almost all of the YC projects... they're all things that I frankly would have had virtually no interest in coding as a kid. It all looks CRUD apps with the word "social" in the pitch. Yeah, this was actually a point of contention when OSS started getting big, I think. But it was inevitable--things that are fun to write, people will write for fun. I think there's some fun stuff left. Low level code tied to specific hardware and code that very few people need and can be held as a competitive advantage, for instance.
- daviding 16y agoFair points, cathartic is probably the wrong word - how about 'draw a line under'. I don't think Microsoft is bad to want to make money, more that the choices around now make it a different dynamic around web technologies. I'm not sure why others write these posts, for me it was more a long winded way to say 'After a long time I'm not mainly using the Microsoft dev stack, here's what this blog will be about'. I won't suddenly forget 6 years of .net, but for me it's quite a shift.
- guelo 16y agoI don't know where you read "visceral dislike" into what he wrote, I thought he laid out a logical reasonable case against them.
- daviding 16y agoWith topics like these I think people project a lot of their own decision processes. I enjoyed writing it, and if people get some sort of reaction or thoughts out of it then I'm happy.
- wazoox 16y ago> Why do people have such a visceral dislike of licensing costs? They don't; what they dislike is the hassle of managing license keys, not being able to fix broken software themselves. The problem is not to be free as beer, but free as speech. And this is why RMS is true :)
- eftpotrm 16y agoIf I'm using off-the-shelf software rather than writing my own, it's because either it's huge and complex or it's not important enough to make time from other projects. In either case, I'm trading off flexibility for the speed at which I can have _something_ and I care far more about having something that works tolerably well than having something I can change to make it work better. If it breaks, I'll find something else; the software ecosystem is big enough now. Which is why I'll take "reasonably reliably working" over "I've got the rights to fix it".
- jf 16y agoI'm very glad that you wrote this. Thank you.
- daviding 16y agoThanks for taking the time to read it.
- Nate75Sanders 16y agoYou were probably wreaking havoc -- probably not reeking havoc, but maybe. This is also sometimes the specialty of CompSci graduates.
- dstone 16y agoFascinating. I'm going through sort of the same thing myself. I'm writing ASP.NET MVC and C# at work. I like C#. I think ASP.NET MVC is a good framework. That being said, I've been doing .NET stuff for a good 9 years now (2001, when the first public beta was released). I'm kind of tired of it. I don't feel I'm learning a whole lot of new stuff and it doesn't excite me anymore. I've been dabbling in Ruby and Rails recently and playing with node.js. This stuff is interesting. Good luck with your journey.
- daviding 16y agoThanks. It's more the case I have the opportunity, as I'm in start-up mode again. However hard I tried to lay out a balanced case on my thought process I still expected a bit of a 'Why does he hate Microsoft?' reactions. I'm living in a house Microsoft helped pay for, and as others have commented, the tools aren't really everything. I can enjoy ruby or python or anything else as I see the same patterns in them all. In short, we live in interesting times and it's fun to explore if you get the chance.
- savoy11 16y agoWhy are people always writing these types of posts? .NET/VS.NET is one of the best programming environments ever engineered, no need to bash Microsoft on that. And what's the deal with licensing? We, as software developers and entrepreneurs, eventually want to charge money for some product/service and I personally find it much easier to do in .NET/Corporate settings - Microsoft has just managed to educate people that software costs money. I find it much, much harder to charge money (I'm in the developer tools space) in the "FREE", open source, free is beer, as... whatever, and all that crap world, where people would just expect you to work full-time several years with $0 revenue - I just do not understand all that crap. So massive respect to Microsoft - these guys are doing us a huge favor by educating people that software costs money.
- mathgladiator 16y ago> I'm in the developer tools space We are the worst market out there to sell because we all love to build different colored dog houses and paint bike sheds various shades purple. - - - I've loved VS.NET in the past, but it doesn't make me happy any more. Personally, I can't have fun working with it. It is impressive, but it lacks soul. My rants on IDEs in general: http://blog.mathgladiator.com/2010/10/on-ides-refinement-of-my-30-lessons.html http://blog.mathgladiator.com/2010/10/on-ides-refinement-of-... http://blog.mathgladiator.com/2010/10/if-i-were-to-write-another-ide-or-being.html http://blog.mathgladiator.com/2010/10/if-i-were-to-write-ano...
- blub 16y ago> So massive respect to Microsoft - these guys are doing us a huge favor by educating people that software costs money. Unlike Apple and Google which educate people that software costs 0.99$ or is free. What the heck can I charge if Id software publishes their latest game for 0.99$?
- joe_the_user 16y agoAside from the many valid MS-specific issues, my recent take on "why I abandoned X for Y" is that programming is still an inherently hard and frustrating activity. The final results are frustrating compared to the promise of X; The problems of Ruby-on-Rails or .NET or beautiful Perl one-liners whatever don't appear tell you get to a certain scale. So the next great thing (or the retro-great-thing or whatever) can always look good compared to the big mess you've land yourself in. And .NET could well be the best engineered system in the world for all I know but it's crazy frustrating once you get to a certain scale. Therefore, we should abandon X and do Y, whose promises haven't yet been broken.
- wyclif 16y agoWreaked, not "reeked." Savvy?
- gjm11 16y agoWreaked, actually. http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Skitt%E2%80%99s_Law http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Skitt%E2%80%99s_Law triumphs again!
- gjm11 16y agoUh, wyclif, when someone corrects an error you've made, it's impolite to edit what you wrote without saying you've done so. (Because it then makes the person who noticed your error look like an idiot correcting a mistake that wasn't there. Which isn't very nice.)
- daviding 16y agoCan I pretend it was a pun?
- blub 16y agoI did webdev back in 2006, I started relearning it in 2010. The problems you had in 2006 are still problems you have in 2010. IE6, browser fragmentation, HTTP, JavaScript. I would argue that today you have TOO MUCH choice. You have people endlessly debating whether to learn Ruby or Python (but never PHP), whether HTML5 will replace Flash (sorta, kinda), whether to use -moz CSS properties and so on. Web development has solved distribution and possibly piracy and not much else. Still struggling on mobile, still difficult to develop cross-platform, still hasn't replaced anything of importance as preached for the last three years. The web is becoming the ultimate blub. I think the author is in the honeymoon phase when it comes to the web and open-source. Both are important, but they aren't going to win/kill/destroy the alternatives.
- chipsy 16y agoOr to put it another way: The web doesn't have any "Right Things." It has a whole lot of "Worse is Betters" that are flawed, immature or inadequate, and if you really try to push them to their limits, you're walking into a minefield. Maybe in another 5 years, we'll see things calm down again, but it really is a confusing software landscape these days.
- pohl 16y agoLet's give the web at least one Right Thing(tm): the distribution model. The old days of asking "how do I get these updates out to every node of my gargantuan organization's network every Monday?" are so gone that we forget to put this in the tradeoff list.
- daviding 16y agoThat's still a pretty big single thing though.
- mlok 16y ago"The web is becoming the ultimate blub." Are you suggesting the web is becoming the ultimate you?
- 16y ago
- vb6 16y agoI am going to have to disagree with bananarama here. It IS what you do and NOT the way that you do it. If an architect spends his time considering his choice of pencils he's either in the wrong job or bored with his current project
- rbanffy 16y agoCreative flow is easily disruptible. A programmer having to use a different editor, or becoming conscious of a different keyboard than the one it replaced is disruptive. He may want to use the right pencil, the one that feels right in his hand so he can muster the subconscious forces that drive his talent. Programmers are no more assembly-line workers than architects.
- nhoj 16y ago"Microsoft does great things, but it’s become safe and dependable rather than exciting and risky." After running into yet another bug in a new and shiny framework, costing me oh so much time, safe and dependable is starting to sound rather nice.If you always use cutting-edge do you really save time over using the tried and tested? A lot of time is lost due to having to learn new things, lack of documentation, lack of features and bugs. There is no absolute answer of course but it's a thing I think is important to keep in mind.
- SimplePast 16y agoGood programming environments are not yet invented ! Certainly VS.NET is more productive than Turbo Pascal, but IMHO the programming experience is the same.
- mhinze 16y agoI'm tired of these posts. I'm tired of an industry where it's assumed that using technical tools is the skill, rather than understanding and applying technical concepts. I'm tired of "I'm a .NET developer" or "I'm a python developer". I want a world where we're not tied to a particular framework, where people hire expert technologists and business analysts regardless of what framework they used at their last job. Where managers truly value people and interactions over tools and process. The inhumanity and subsequent waste of it all is really piling up, and theses posts only reinforce the ignorant and shallow perception that the tools make the professional.
- roadnottaken 16y agoWhy is it different than the way doctors specialize. Sure, a doctor should have a basic understanding of all physiology - but you want the guy that operates on your heart to have lots of experience. Why is specialization in programming offensive for some reason? (FWIW - I am not a programmer/developer)
- roc 16y agoPrecisely because tool-specialization isn't a good analogue to problem-domain specialization. e.g. Saying "Ruby Developer" isn't like saying "Brain Surgeon". It's more like saying "Hammer Carpenter" or "Scalpel Surgeon". Web Developer, Embedded Developer -- these are more akin to specialization on the order of "Brain Surgeon" or "Endocrinologist". Notably, no-one's taking issue with that kind of specialization.
- Gilson_Silveira 16y agoI think you can compare a programmer more to a musician than to a doctor specialist. If you have the feeling for the music you can create music using anything. Ideas just blow to your mind. The tool, well, it's is just an interface to concretize your idea. But I think specialization is not a bad idea.
- mhinze 16y agoThere are valid specializations for programmers. There are application developers, systems architects, UI engineers, operations specialists, cryptographers, scientific programmers, etc. You don't care that your doctor uses the Acme Scalpel 4000, you just want your gut cut.