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"The real reason startups don’t use .NET is based more on culture than technology." Ding ding ding, we have a winner. It's more about which tribe you want to b

"The real reason startups don’t use .NET is based more on culture than technology." Ding ding ding, we have a winner. It's more about which tribe you want to belong to than anything these days.

bmelton 15y ago
I've written code in a lot of languages and on a lot of platforms. I ultimately switched to Python not because I wanted to be part of the cabal of Pythonistas (which I frankly believe is much less 'cool' than Ruby), but because it has exceptional platform coverage, is highly readable - solving a problem I've had working with teams or with old code, and is easy to get up to speed in. Mainly though, it allows me to run my code in the cheapest way possible, and scale for pennies on the dollar compared to .Net. I love Visual Studio, and I'm more than happy to write .Net code (though I haven't done it in awhile,) but I won't for my personal projects because the resulting product is prohibitively more expensive to run and operate than one built in a variety of other languages.
dasil003 15y ago
Yes, but how do you decide which tribe to join initially? This argument bothers me because it implies that somehow people are not being objective. Well, the truth is you'll never get anything done unless you form opinions and move forward, but that doesn't mean they don't have good reasons besides peer influence. Personally I have never programmed on a Microsoft stack because I don't want to be hostage to the whims and resource allocation of one company. With open source frameworks I know that the project quality is a goal unto itself, whereas a Microsoft project lives or dies by its ability to contribute to their larger strategy. With open source the worst case scenario is that the community dies and I have to fix problems myself. Unless there's a compelling reason to go with a proprietary stack (eg. access to the iOS App Store or Windows) then I'll go open source every time, and not just because my friends do.
generalk 15y ago
I think there are plenty of valid reasons to avoid MS technology that don't boil down to "because I want to be like these guys." If you base your infrastructure around Microsoft technology, you're essentially stuck in MSland. Of course, since you're using .NET, you must also have Windows servers and IIS. If you need persistent storage, MS says to use MS SQL Server. You could use other things, but then you're going outside the lines. OTOH, if you build using free tools, you can change as needs demand. Apache httpd suddenly a little too heavyweight for your needs? Switch to nginx! MySQL working okay but you need geospatial queries, for instance? Migrate to PostgreSQL. Or how about the ability to run Redis natively, or access to a POSIX environment that literally every other major operating system supports? If technology isn't playing a role in your technology decisions, you're doing it wrong.

"The real reason startups don’t use .NET is based more on culture than technology." Ding ding ding, we have a winner. It's more about which tribe you want to belong to than anything these days.

bmelton 15y ago

I've written code in a lot of languages and on a lot of platforms. I ultimately switched to Python not because I wanted to be part of the cabal of Pythonistas (which I frankly believe is much less 'cool' than Ruby), but because it has exceptional platform coverage, is highly readable - solving a problem I've had working with teams or with old code, and is easy to get up to speed in. Mainly though, it allows me to run my code in the cheapest way possible, and scale for pennies on the dollar compared to .Net. I love Visual Studio, and I'm more than happy to write .Net code (though I haven't done it in awhile,) but I won't for my personal projects because the resulting product is prohibitively more expensive to run and operate than one built in a variety of other languages.

dasil003 15y ago

Yes, but how do you decide which tribe to join initially? This argument bothers me because it implies that somehow people are not being objective. Well, the truth is you'll never get anything done unless you form opinions and move forward, but that doesn't mean they don't have good reasons besides peer influence. Personally I have never programmed on a Microsoft stack because I don't want to be hostage to the whims and resource allocation of one company. With open source frameworks I know that the project quality is a goal unto itself, whereas a Microsoft project lives or dies by its ability to contribute to their larger strategy. With open source the worst case scenario is that the community dies and I have to fix problems myself. Unless there's a compelling reason to go with a proprietary stack (eg. access to the iOS App Store or Windows) then I'll go open source every time, and not just because my friends do.

generalk 15y ago

I think there are plenty of valid reasons to avoid MS technology that don't boil down to "because I want to be like these guys." If you base your infrastructure around Microsoft technology, you're essentially stuck in MSland. Of course, since you're using .NET, you must also have Windows servers and IIS. If you need persistent storage, MS says to use MS SQL Server. You could use other things, but then you're going outside the lines. OTOH, if you build using free tools, you can change as needs demand. Apache httpd suddenly a little too heavyweight for your needs? Switch to nginx! MySQL working okay but you need geospatial queries, for instance? Migrate to PostgreSQL. Or how about the ability to run Redis natively, or access to a POSIX environment that literally every other major operating system supports? If technology isn't playing a role in your technology decisions, you're doing it wrong.