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Comment by statictype | Hacker News Reader

Their developer tools are really good. They have a reasonably language-neutral platform in .NET (which, contrary to what you say, has been healthy for - what - a decade now?).

Our company's codebase is written in C#. Some domain specific language parsers were implemented using F# (with Fparsec) and the framework can be extended using IronPython. At some points, we have IronPython code being called from F# code built on a framework written in C#. And it works without specifically having to handle it.

Visual Studio's debugger can seamless step between code written in C# and F#.

There are lots of things I miss about Unix dev tools but the Microsoft technology stack is not an unreasonable choice to make.

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You have a good point. I should have been more precise; I was talking more about the tippy top of their stack, that is, whatever app framework or tool is this week's answer to some relatively simple question, like how to retrieve results from a DB and display them on a web page, or how to display some relatively advanced interface on that page.

As an outsider (the last time I developed on a Windows platform was 2001) I feel like I see different acronyms all the time in the Windows app-building world, each with a lifetime of about three years.

If I'm in a bookstore, the cover of the latest Windows related magazines always seems to be about some dramatically new way to do some relatively boring thing, and how you should abandon everything you're doing and use this stuff instead.

But perhaps it is not fair to judge the entire MS platform by these more frothy aspects.

Hello nielk and welcome to the software industry.

Microsoft (like any other major software vendor) has popular products and not so popular products. The popular ones survive, the unpopular ones don't die off, they end up still being supported just not in such a way.

See MSFT's data access libaries, you ado, ado.net, entity framework, linq to sql and zeus knows what else now.

You also have COM+. While it's an overcomplicated mess, and not as popular as it once was, it's still supported.

I would hope that MS's solution for some mundane problem has changed since 2001. 10 years is a long time (especially for development tools/frameworks)... and I'm glad for the innovation that has happened over the past 10 years even though things were tried and later thrown out. Failures are part of the process of innovation.

Have you looked at how ruby puts stuff on a web page? 1.8 or 1.9 or ee or jruby? rails or merb or sinatra? mongrel or thin or unicorn or passenger? riak or cassandra or memcache or redis or couch?

Touché.

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