4 ms·

That's what I'm getting out of pretty much this entire post. As an asp.net mvc developer by trade, I could easily say that it could take me hours/days to get s

by devrelm 13y ago

That's what I'm getting out of pretty much this entire post. As an asp.net mvc developer by trade, I could easily say that it could take me hours/days to get stuff done in node.js/rails/django/name-your-framework, that I could otherwise get done in minutes in mvc. Of course, I'm self-aware enough to realize that it's because I have 4 consecutive years of experience with .net, but only a cumulative of maybe a few months in all other technologies (php/rails/python/c/c++) combined (not including school-work.)

pnathan 13y ago
That's a reasonable thing to say, but when I could get a RoR app developed in a fraction of the same time as MVC .NET, despite being ignorant of Ruby or Rails and MVC (I knew C# a bit beforehand), it was pretty much game over, RoR won.
orclev 13y ago
I've worked with a lot of languages and a lot of frameworks over the years, and the ones from Microsoft are always hands down the most needlessly complicated and poorly documented of the bunch. PHP may be a double claw hammer, but at least it's a really well documented double claw hammer. MVC includes at least 5 different kinds of double claw hammer, a normal hammer, a combination hammer/chainsaw, a mislabeled jar of nitric acid, and a swiss army knife, and half complete and half accurate documentation of 2/3rds of it. You like MVC because you've basically spent the time to find all the good bits and just pretend all the tons and tons of horrible bits don't exist. Good for you, but that also means anyone new to basically any MS tech has to spend years learning where all the mines are buried, when instead they could use basically any other tech stack in the world and not have to worry about navigating a mine field in the first place. Oh, and just for fun every 5 years or so MS deprecates that particular mine field, lays a new one, and forces everyone to go play in the new minefield instead.
- devrelm 13y ago
  I disagree that MVC is not well documented, but perhaps I've just learned where the good documentation is (for MVC.) That said, I have to agree that every time I've dived into PHP/RoR, there have been plenty of articles with well-drawn maps of the minefield (to borrow your analogy.) > Oh, and just for fun every 5 years or so MS deprecates that particular mine field, lays a new one, and forces everyone to go play in the new minefield instead. I know I started at the beginning with this new minefield (MVC came out less than a year before I started using it,) but I don't see this happening as much, at least not with MS's web offerings. The last version or two of MVC and EntityFramework have been OSS under Apache 2, so they can continue to be developed even if MS decides to go a separate route. I understand that this is not the case for their desktop and mobile offerings, and that they have jerked their developers in that field around in different directions each time they come out with a new OS. I think that their web offerings are more stable. The only things that may change fundamentally are server components (IIS, SQL Server, MVC, EF, etc.), or the browser. If the browser changes, everyone's screwed; and if the server components change, the developer can simply decide to stay on older versions (until licenses run out, which I'll concede as one problem.) And of course, all this flows back to documentation. PHP/Python/RoR have much better documentation because they're all much more widely used. If more people used MVC, more people would write about it, and there would be more documentation for it. The only remaining issue is a pretty big one: cost. Yes, there's a VS Express Web Edition, but that has its own issues. So, you're left with BizSpark as the next best option. It's what I've done. I have 2 more years left before I have to decide whether to start paying. So far it's great, but I know that it's going to come back and bite me in the ass unless I start something profitable before then. And I believe that that's the real reason that it's not more widely used; or at least the original reason, with lack of documentation and other MS-hate being secondary to and/or consequences of it. In a community where people have 5 ideas fail before hitting something profitable, it's hard to justify the extra cost of $1000 or more per developer, even if it's actually free for the first few years. Why risk paying $1000+ per developer and an extra $100+ per server 3 years from now, when you can start with something free and have it still be free 3 years from now? That's what it all boils down to. I'll admit, I'm probably tossing in the towel on MVC soon. But it's not because of poor documentation or fear of being forced to switch to a new API requiring a large rewrite on my part. It's because 1) the IDE and servers are 5-10x more expensive than those for Python/Ruby/Node/PHP; and 2) everybody's using Python/Ruby/Node/PHP, so finding work is tough. After all, what good is working on a side project to show off my MVC skills, if nobody will hire me for it anyway?

by devrelm 13y ago

pnathan 13y ago

That's a reasonable thing to say, but when I could get a RoR app developed in a fraction of the same time as MVC .NET, despite being ignorant of Ruby or Rails and MVC (I knew C# a bit beforehand), it was pretty much game over, RoR won.

orclev 13y ago

I've worked with a lot of languages and a lot of frameworks over the years, and the ones from Microsoft are always hands down the most needlessly complicated and poorly documented of the bunch. PHP may be a double claw hammer, but at least it's a really well documented double claw hammer. MVC includes at least 5 different kinds of double claw hammer, a normal hammer, a combination hammer/chainsaw, a mislabeled jar of nitric acid, and a swiss army knife, and half complete and half accurate documentation of 2/3rds of it. You like MVC because you've basically spent the time to find all the good bits and just pretend all the tons and tons of horrible bits don't exist. Good for you, but that also means anyone new to basically any MS tech has to spend years learning where all the mines are buried, when instead they could use basically any other tech stack in the world and not have to worry about navigating a mine field in the first place. Oh, and just for fun every 5 years or so MS deprecates that particular mine field, lays a new one, and forces everyone to go play in the new minefield instead.

devrelm 13y ago
I disagree that MVC is not well documented, but perhaps I've just learned where the good documentation is (for MVC.) That said, I have to agree that every time I've dived into PHP/RoR, there have been plenty of articles with well-drawn maps of the minefield (to borrow your analogy.) > Oh, and just for fun every 5 years or so MS deprecates that particular mine field, lays a new one, and forces everyone to go play in the new minefield instead. I know I started at the beginning with this new minefield (MVC came out less than a year before I started using it,) but I don't see this happening as much, at least not with MS's web offerings. The last version or two of MVC and EntityFramework have been OSS under Apache 2, so they can continue to be developed even if MS decides to go a separate route. I understand that this is not the case for their desktop and mobile offerings, and that they have jerked their developers in that field around in different directions each time they come out with a new OS. I think that their web offerings are more stable. The only things that may change fundamentally are server components (IIS, SQL Server, MVC, EF, etc.), or the browser. If the browser changes, everyone's screwed; and if the server components change, the developer can simply decide to stay on older versions (until licenses run out, which I'll concede as one problem.) And of course, all this flows back to documentation. PHP/Python/RoR have much better documentation because they're all much more widely used. If more people used MVC, more people would write about it, and there would be more documentation for it. The only remaining issue is a pretty big one: cost. Yes, there's a VS Express Web Edition, but that has its own issues. So, you're left with BizSpark as the next best option. It's what I've done. I have 2 more years left before I have to decide whether to start paying. So far it's great, but I know that it's going to come back and bite me in the ass unless I start something profitable before then. And I believe that that's the real reason that it's not more widely used; or at least the original reason, with lack of documentation and other MS-hate being secondary to and/or consequences of it. In a community where people have 5 ideas fail before hitting something profitable, it's hard to justify the extra cost of $1000 or more per developer, even if it's actually free for the first few years. Why risk paying $1000+ per developer and an extra $100+ per server 3 years from now, when you can start with something free and have it still be free 3 years from now? That's what it all boils down to. I'll admit, I'm probably tossing in the towel on MVC soon. But it's not because of poor documentation or fear of being forced to switch to a new API requiring a large rewrite on my part. It's because 1) the IDE and servers are 5-10x more expensive than those for Python/Ruby/Node/PHP; and 2) everybody's using Python/Ruby/Node/PHP, so finding work is tough. After all, what good is working on a side project to show off my MVC skills, if nobody will hire me for it anyway?