Introducing Nancy, a lightweight web framework inspired by Sinatra | Hacker News Reader

Introducing Nancy, a lightweight web framework inspired by Sinatra

elegantcode.com

I'm going to generalize here, sorry.

The comments section of this blog post illustrates the problems I have with the .NET "community", as a "part-time" .NET programmer.

It's full of "what a waste of time!" & "why would anyone use this?" comments. It illustrates the lack of vision and inventiveness in the community. I guess "because I could", or "because I wanted to(.|learn)" wasn't good enough.

Aside from a small minority of brilliant folks like Hanselman, the .NET community is pretty bleak, boring, and stale. It's hard for me to get excited about anything in that world when I know they're just cribbing features that have been around the OSS world for a few years (I'm looking at you ASP.NET MVC).

Why work with engineered ripoffs, when I can just use the real thing for free (and without any ridiculous licensing)? The real thing (Rails/Django/PHP/etc) is more organic and agile, oh and it's freakin' FREE!

I see the same sort of mindlessly dismissive comments even here if a story gets enough attention. "Why another systems language?" and "Why another ORM?" just from stuff I've read on HN today.

Sinatra is a great framework, but I think this just underscores how nice Ruby is for DSLs and frameworks. There is more boilerplate here with Nancy, and it just looks clunky.

Not saying there isn't room for a lightweight C# framework though; I don't know of anything beyond ASP.NET.

That's quite a hack. It took me a second to realize it was C#. I'm sure it would scare off your average enterprise code monkey.

Given a lot of the comments, it seems like the poor guy is getting a lot of crap from people who don't get why someone would write something like this. I wonder how projects grow in that community with that level of resistance at their origin.

A lot? Most of the comments seem positive or inquiring in nature. I think it's a good idea that people weigh the pros and cons, especially when it's not obvious why they should select this framework over any other.

"how projects grow in that community"

They don't, generally. C#/.NET hasn't exactly been a fertile breeding ground for innovative new open source projects. The most important .NET project are typically Java or Ruby ports (unit testing ports, Rails-alikes, ORM ports, NAnt, etc.).

C# is actually a fairly nice language to work with, and if it scares of the code monkey, thats a good thing.

But this isn't idiomatic C# either, which makes it harder to write (or at least internalize), and harder for everybody else to maintain.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com