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Licensing fees and tech made for large slow enterprise teams. I've seen the shops that have C# or Java as their backend and they move too slow to be a competit

by omouse 11y ago

Licensing fees and tech made for large slow enterprise teams. I've seen the shops that have C# or Java as their backend and they move too slow to be a competitive threat. If their frontend is written in Ruby/Rails or Python/Django then maybe they have a chance against the competition but usually they'll be held back by the slow progress made on the backend. For some reason the big slow enterprise mindset gets transmitted through the choice of language. Companies that use Scala or some other JVM-based language are less likely to be enterprisey for example. Licensing fees and management are a big deal for Microsoft. It all relates to the enterprise vs hacker mentality.

vonmoltke 11y ago
I work at a small company writing NLP R&D software. Our core in-house codebase is entirely Java. There is no "enterprise mindset" here; in fact, many of the engineers make fun of that mindset. Choice of language only affects your culture if you believe choice of language affects your culture and let it happen.
- rattray 11y ago
  > Choice of language only affects your culture if you believe choice of language affects your culture and let it happen. I would disagree with that. I just came from a startup on .NET. The develop/build/test/deploy cycles were really slow (mostly due to tooling/infra, not the language), which meant devs didn't ship frequently and didn't test their code much. That affected the culture quite a bit: no rapid experimentation means no hacker mentality. It may be that you can develop rapidly with C# or Java (I just wouldn't know, I haven't ever used either in a highly-productive environment) but if they hold you back from shipping quickly, they hold you back from the hacker/startup mentality.
jaredhansen 11y ago
> tech made for large slow enterprise teams. This is complete nonsense. It is popular nonsense, but nonsense nonetheless. .NET is a perfectly reasonable tech stack for certain kinds of problems -- for example if your application has to interact regularly with MSFT core APIs, you'd have to have a pretty compelling reason NOT to use the MSFT-native stack. > It all relates to the enterprise vs hacker mentality This too is a story that HN likes to tell itself to justify its preference for this week's hot new javascript framework (or whatever). At the end of the day, different tools are good for different use cases -- and while yes, .NET tends to work better when you're coding to "enterprisey" use cases, that doesn't mean that your product team itself has to operate in a "large slow enterprise" way (Plug: If you're a top notch .NET developer and you want to work with others who are as well, at a place that doesn't treat C# and .NET as second class citizens, hey, drop me a line.)
- omouse 11y ago
  Sure but using C# and Java are fairly good indicators that there's a slow-moving enterprise mindset at work. I guess I should have said that in my comment; that they're indicators. I didn't mean to imply that there aren't some good uses for C# and Java. You mention one and the other reply mentions another.

by omouse 11y ago

vonmoltke 11y ago

I work at a small company writing NLP R&D software. Our core in-house codebase is entirely Java. There is no "enterprise mindset" here; in fact, many of the engineers make fun of that mindset. Choice of language only affects your culture if you believe choice of language affects your culture and let it happen.

rattray 11y ago
> Choice of language only affects your culture if you believe choice of language affects your culture and let it happen. I would disagree with that. I just came from a startup on .NET. The develop/build/test/deploy cycles were really slow (mostly due to tooling/infra, not the language), which meant devs didn't ship frequently and didn't test their code much. That affected the culture quite a bit: no rapid experimentation means no hacker mentality. It may be that you can develop rapidly with C# or Java (I just wouldn't know, I haven't ever used either in a highly-productive environment) but if they hold you back from shipping quickly, they hold you back from the hacker/startup mentality.

jaredhansen 11y ago

> tech made for large slow enterprise teams. This is complete nonsense. It is popular nonsense, but nonsense nonetheless. .NET is a perfectly reasonable tech stack for certain kinds of problems -- for example if your application has to interact regularly with MSFT core APIs, you'd have to have a pretty compelling reason NOT to use the MSFT-native stack. > It all relates to the enterprise vs hacker mentality This too is a story that HN likes to tell itself to justify its preference for this week's hot new javascript framework (or whatever). At the end of the day, different tools are good for different use cases -- and while yes, .NET tends to work better when you're coding to "enterprisey" use cases, that doesn't mean that your product team itself has to operate in a "large slow enterprise" way (Plug: If you're a top notch .NET developer and you want to work with others who are as well, at a place that doesn't treat C# and .NET as second class citizens, hey, drop me a line.)

omouse 11y ago
Sure but using C# and Java are fairly good indicators that there's a slow-moving enterprise mindset at work. I guess I should have said that in my comment; that they're indicators. I didn't mean to imply that there aren't some good uses for C# and Java. You mention one and the other reply mentions another.