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Because it's too easy! Nerds would rather spend countless hours at the command line figuring things out than having a nice interface to get stuff configured and

Because it's too easy! Nerds would rather spend countless hours at the command line figuring things out than having a nice interface to get stuff configured and running. As a developer, I don't want to spend my life also configuring servers - sometimes it's just nice to get things working without a ton of hassle. Of course nowadays we use Azure or AppHarbor for everything but we still have some services running on IIS internally. There is this counter culture against anything MS on HN - I don't get why.

rjh29 14y ago
At our shop we prefer scripting, automation and automatically deployed/centrally configured config over GUIs. The learning curve may be a little higher, but once you've got a taste for how quickly you can do things with scripts, Puppet etc. and how fast you can scale out, you'll find that you actually _save_ countless hours. We can also use virtualisation everywhere, for testing, quick deployment, offsite deployment, cloud... without worrying about licenses. The fact that EC2 Linux is significantly cheaper than Azure is just a bonus.
corresation 14y ago
Because it's too easy! I have to disagree. Windows Server has the illusion of ease, but the same mechanisms that guide your hand in the early days turn into a major hindrance later on. There isn't a Windows server running anywhere that doesn't have event logs jammed full of potentially deadly warnings and errors, and most "easily" setup Windows servers are setup insecurely and wrong. In my personal experience (and I have a lot of experience with both) I've always found Linux build outs much more predictable and easy. As to the "counter culture", that goes back to when Microsoft really were the pricks of the technology world. They've gotten much better, but it's hard to shake that.
nkohari 14y ago
No one wants to spend their life configuring servers. That's why tools like Chef and Puppet exist -- so you can write code that will do it for you. They just don't work as well for Windows as they do for Linux. After a significant amount of experience in the .NET ecosystem, I believe the majority of the anti-Microsoft sentiment is well-deserved. At one point, there was a lot of innovation in .NET OSS, but it seems to have ground to a halt within the last few years. It's possible I'm just projecting because of my own experience, but it seems like many of the more influential members of the .NET ecosystem have gone on to do other things. It's not that Microsoft or .NET is bad -- it's just that there are better options.
- brass9 14y ago
  > After a significant amount of experience in the .NET ecosystem, I believe the majority of the anti-Microsoft sentiment is well-deserved. At one point, there was a lot of innovation in .NET OSS, but it seems to have ground to a halt within the last few years. It's possible I'm just projecting because of my own experience, but it seems like many of the more influential members of the .NET ecosystem have gone on to do other things. That's not entirely true. Pretty much the entire ASP.net MVC stack has now been open-source. Entity Framework is also open-source. I agree, 3rd party OSS ecosystem is much smaller than Java.
  - nkohari 14y ago
    I don't mean this to be derogatory, but ASP.NET MVC, as great as it is, was not particularly innovative when it was originally written. Entity Framework is an ORM, and by definition not particularly innovative. Why isn't something like Cassandra or Hadoop written using .NET? It's the Windows requirement that makes ideas like that die on the vine. Shit, there are more interesting systems built using Erlang/OTP than there are for .NET. Edit: RavenDB is probably the closest thing to new tech that's currently happening on .NET, and it's because Oren Eini is one of the few innovators left in the ecosystem.
    - sultezdukes 14y ago
      I don't mean this to be derogatory, but ASP.NET MVC, as great as it is, was not particularly innovative when it was originally written. Entity Framework is an ORM, and by definition not particularly innovative. Where did the parent say anything about innovation?
      - nkohari 14y ago
        > After a significant amount of experience in the .NET ecosystem, I believe the majority of the anti-Microsoft sentiment is well-deserved. At one point, there was a lot of innovation in .NET OSS, but it seems to have ground to a halt within the last few years. I said it.
- 14y ago
stonemetal 14y ago
It seems to me to depend on what side of the world you land Dev or Ops. Ops is much easier on the OSS side. RDPing in to a hundred boxes to click a button is the height tediousness, the oss alternative is running a script(and the tools that can make that target all one hundred at once). On the Dev side there is nothing that matches C# on CLR. Java isn't conceptually different but it is missing so many niceties as to make it distasteful. Scala or Clojure maybe, but they don't have the richer environment that C# does (certainly not a reason to dimiss them out of hand.)

rjh29 14y ago

At our shop we prefer scripting, automation and automatically deployed/centrally configured config over GUIs. The learning curve may be a little higher, but once you've got a taste for how quickly you can do things with scripts, Puppet etc. and how fast you can scale out, you'll find that you actually _save_ countless hours. We can also use virtualisation everywhere, for testing, quick deployment, offsite deployment, cloud... without worrying about licenses. The fact that EC2 Linux is significantly cheaper than Azure is just a bonus.

corresation 14y ago

Because it's too easy! I have to disagree. Windows Server has the illusion of ease, but the same mechanisms that guide your hand in the early days turn into a major hindrance later on. There isn't a Windows server running anywhere that doesn't have event logs jammed full of potentially deadly warnings and errors, and most "easily" setup Windows servers are setup insecurely and wrong. In my personal experience (and I have a lot of experience with both) I've always found Linux build outs much more predictable and easy. As to the "counter culture", that goes back to when Microsoft really were the pricks of the technology world. They've gotten much better, but it's hard to shake that.

nkohari 14y ago

No one wants to spend their life configuring servers. That's why tools like Chef and Puppet exist -- so you can write code that will do it for you. They just don't work as well for Windows as they do for Linux. After a significant amount of experience in the .NET ecosystem, I believe the majority of the anti-Microsoft sentiment is well-deserved. At one point, there was a lot of innovation in .NET OSS, but it seems to have ground to a halt within the last few years. It's possible I'm just projecting because of my own experience, but it seems like many of the more influential members of the .NET ecosystem have gone on to do other things. It's not that Microsoft or .NET is bad -- it's just that there are better options.

brass9 14y ago
> After a significant amount of experience in the .NET ecosystem, I believe the majority of the anti-Microsoft sentiment is well-deserved. At one point, there was a lot of innovation in .NET OSS, but it seems to have ground to a halt within the last few years. It's possible I'm just projecting because of my own experience, but it seems like many of the more influential members of the .NET ecosystem have gone on to do other things. That's not entirely true. Pretty much the entire ASP.net MVC stack has now been open-source. Entity Framework is also open-source. I agree, 3rd party OSS ecosystem is much smaller than Java.
- nkohari 14y ago
  I don't mean this to be derogatory, but ASP.NET MVC, as great as it is, was not particularly innovative when it was originally written. Entity Framework is an ORM, and by definition not particularly innovative. Why isn't something like Cassandra or Hadoop written using .NET? It's the Windows requirement that makes ideas like that die on the vine. Shit, there are more interesting systems built using Erlang/OTP than there are for .NET. Edit: RavenDB is probably the closest thing to new tech that's currently happening on .NET, and it's because Oren Eini is one of the few innovators left in the ecosystem.
  - sultezdukes 14y ago
    I don't mean this to be derogatory, but ASP.NET MVC, as great as it is, was not particularly innovative when it was originally written. Entity Framework is an ORM, and by definition not particularly innovative. Where did the parent say anything about innovation?
    - nkohari 14y ago
      > After a significant amount of experience in the .NET ecosystem, I believe the majority of the anti-Microsoft sentiment is well-deserved. At one point, there was a lot of innovation in .NET OSS, but it seems to have ground to a halt within the last few years. I said it.
14y ago

stonemetal 14y ago

It seems to me to depend on what side of the world you land Dev or Ops. Ops is much easier on the OSS side. RDPing in to a hundred boxes to click a button is the height tediousness, the oss alternative is running a script(and the tools that can make that target all one hundred at once). On the Dev side there is nothing that matches C# on CLR. Java isn't conceptually different but it is missing so many niceties as to make it distasteful. Scala or Clojure maybe, but they don't have the richer environment that C# does (certainly not a reason to dimiss them out of hand.)