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Comment by keyle | Hacker News Reader

Funny, but I felt the opposite. I'm sick of open source software that's documented like a donkey's ass and that never works. And all those 'developers' that can't be productive and create things, instead all they're doing is plumbing joomla with jquery while high on json.

I guess it's like a mid life crisis, you just have to flip side.

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I, too, am sick of open source software that's poorly documented and never works. Fortunately, I use open source software that is quite well-documented and almost always works.

What's your beef with jQuery? What better closed-source JavaScript libraries are there?

How is JSON even relevant to this discussion?

Why use the disaster that is Joomla as an example of open source when you could have picked any number of other good CMSs? Besides, Joomla uses MooTools, not jQuery.

Maybe you need to reevaluate the landscape.

I've not used Joomla, but Drupal is the same. Most modules are poorly documented, if at all. Figuring them out is a combination of trial and error and googling. SQL injection, XSS, and other vulnerabilities are discovered constantly. It's like running a never-ending update treadmill if you use more than a few modules.

I might be getting a chance to work with Dot Net Nuke soon. We'll see if a more commercially motivated CMS is any better.

> I might be getting a chance to work with Dot Net Nuke soon.

Prepare to be disappointed.

I used DNN back in '08, and there were plenty of vulnerabilities if you peeked around in the code a bit.. The up side I guess was that they're rarely actually discovered, since there's not much of anyone paying attention.

Actually working with it was slow and tedious as well, really not an experience I'd like to relive (though for all I know it could have improved a lot in the past years.) When forced into using a .Net CMS I find that Umbraco can do the trick and be.. comparatively painless.

Having been there and done that, I can say that riding Microsoft's releases is also a never-ending update treadmill. It's one of the reasons I decided to leave it behind - it felt like they were intentionally releasing New Shiny to stop developers from having time to investigate other options.

Is that how you think of the open source world? A bunch of people writing jquery scripts for joomla? You may want to investigate a bit more (hint: google, facebook, yahoo and a bunch of other all rely on very solid and well documented high quality open source projects).

No it's not what I think of it, it's what I've been exposed to. I've done some open source projects myself, although that was in flex and nobody really picked up after me ;-)

I'm a strong believer in Open source, I used open-bsd for years and I really enjoy Mono and Monotouch.

However the state of 95% of open source project is rather dirty and messy, scruffy development.

95%? Would you like to back that number up with anything?

Even if I grant you that arbitrary statistic, it says nothing about the state of the selection developers have for open source projects. If 5% of all open source projects are good, that leaves an enormous quantity of good open source projects. What languages do you code in?

Point taken, 95% was a nerf gun guess.

I write in C#, AS3, php, js, etc.

I code in as3, php, and js as well. What's your opinion of PHP open source frameworks like CodeIgniter, Kohana, and Symfony? Or perhaps, to take a language that I don't code in but is often lauded, RoR? Or, on the JS side, have you seen this:

http://javascriptmvc.com/

I'm very curious what your opinion (as a C# dev) is on these. My dad loves .NET (and I think rightly so), but often has (what I think to be) a bit of an outdated stance on open source that is mostly borne of a lack of knowledge of the extant options.

And 95% of the commercial, closed source software is also crap. That has nothing to do with being open or closed source, good developers are rare, and so are good ideas.

I agree with you. The languages, documentation, and standard libraries of .NET are awesome. The community is definitely lacking though. These days you can get excellent help on IRC about F# and on stackoverflow for everything, but there is not really a spirit of "lets build something cool" outside of F#.

I think it just takes longer for .NET developers to get to that point with fairly new technologies.

Most of them, incl. me, are too busy working as contractors and raking per-hour rates. We're not going home coding until the sun rise.

I did find .NET contractors to have normal social lives, that might have something to do with the lacking community?

but there is not really a spirit of "lets build something cool" outside of F#.

Can you give an example of something that is cool? Everytime I think of something cool, I can think of something done on the MS stack, but maybe our definitions are different.

I don't understand what you mean. Do you mean cool F# things? All the work of Tomas Petricek is way cool. Outside of .NET there is of course tons of cool stuff, like Clojure, Rails, Haskell stuff, the recent fuss about Yacc is Dead etc.

Just things that are cool. Stuff done in F# or in other communities like the Haskell, Clojure, or Rails community.

I'm trying to see why the things coming out of the Clojure and F# community are cool, but they aren't coming out of the C#/Visual C++ community. For example, ScottGu showed off a C#/Silverlight app built by a 3rd party that was a 3D model of the human body, where you coudl strip layers and interact in real time... all rendering pushed to the GPUs. That seemed cool to me. And they did it in a week.

I'm trying to understand why we have this disconnect.

No, absolutely, there are very cool things coming out of Microsoft with regards to C#/VC++. It's just that they nearly always come from Microsoft, there isn't an active community that does these things.

This can be misleading. Often these sorts of things are built by 3rd party companies and simply released by Microsoft or hosted on MSDN/codeplex or etc. A lot of them are just people at companies with pre-existing relationships with MS coming up with good ideas. It's not the same as more OSS-style ecosystems, but it's also not a centrally planned marketing facade, either.

My point with the 3D body example is that it was not done by MS.

But take a look at a place like CodeProject. People post their projects and write up an article describing the technical aspects of that project. It's actually a surprisingly strong community. In the past month ~500 written or updated. I actually tend to find this place more interesting than GitHub or CodePlex, due to the exposition.

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