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Comment by pluc | Hacker News Reader

I know you're not asking about the personality behind the skills, but I'd sooner take a JS dev than a .NET one (even (and maybe especially) that Core runs on Linux), I'd even switch the entire stack to avoid having to deal with Windows talent. The ClickOps mentality in Microsoft-based ecosystems is astounding.

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This is an absurd generalization

ClickOps? I'm sorry. Node.js tooling, all of it, is worse than CLI experience (arguably you don’t need that much) you get out of .NET save for certain hot-reload edge cases (which is supported, but is subject to constraints expected from a compiled language).

C# is a lower level language that is very accessible but advanced scenarios need the same required reading as e.g. Go which is often misused in systems programming domains.

AFAIK Node doesn't have hot reload.

Front end tooling like Vite does have it but with a Node server you're forced to restart the whole thing (usually with nodemon).

I'm a full stack Microsoft tech stack web dev since the days of asp classic. It's cool that the tech industry is big enough for all of us. I am not sure what the ClickOps mentality is, but I'm pretty sure I have it. Peace.

I think he's referring to all of the clicking required on Windows. For example, on Linux, I can create a project folder, files, etc. and open the project all from the terminal. On windows, I have to click into the file explorer, find the project folder, double click it to open it within the browser. So much clicking.

I admit, it's probably a skill issue. I've been using Linux distros for the last ~10 years, and am now working with .net codebases.

I took it more as a dig at the way Microsoft offers its products. You want to spin up a new VM and deploy an app? Mindlessly click through these menus until you see a green checkmark.

It works well enough most of the time, but it also eliminates the need to think, so when something doesn't work as expected, ClickOps engineers are lost.

with .NET Core you can do everything from the terminal and a text editor though

Precisely. The abstraction of knowledge is a cultural staple of that ecosystem. It's great and all, but you end up with developers who have no understanding of what is happening when they click "next next next next yes finish". On Linux, that understanding is a core pillar of the culture. Stark contrasts.

I'm having fun jumping into this conflict. Since I'm unabashedly on one side of the argument, I feel equipped and compelled to weigh in. The work my small team does is well documented, and when we execute our plans, we can click "next next etc." and everything works quite nicely. You're absolutely correct that I do not want to have an understanding of what is happening when I click next. I have a lot of other things that I need to understand. Humans for example do not have any "next" button so I spend a lot of time wrangling us. When the computer does what I think it out to do, then you're right I am not going to dig in. That's true. Inevitably I'm sometimes surprised when the computer doesn't do what I think it ought to, and I do have to dig in. Then I am perfectly happy to debug the situation. We figure out what's going on, fix it in the near term, update the documentation to address this in the long term, and then go back to clicking "next next etc." I call this productivity. I guess you could look down on me for not wanting to know things I am not getting paid to know. I look at it as saving my limited brain cells and attention for things I am getting paid to deal with.

Create react app.

> Create react app

Okay. How about ...

* dotnet new mvc

* dotnet new api

* dotnet new blazor

* dotnet new grpc

I like (and use) Node, but modern DotNet can easily hold it's own.

This is such a 1996 take.

I’m a macOS/Linux person, but I feel this is a bit of a hot take.

I see Linux users copy and paste commands into their terminals all the time, sometimes without understanding what they’re doing. How is that different from clicking “next, next, next” in a GUI?

Interacting with a computer using ZSH instead of a GUI isn’t inherently better. It’s just different. Knowing how to run basic shell commands doesn’t tell you anything about a person’s understanding of how computers work.

Plenty of non-technical people can run basic shell commands. It doesn’t mean they understand how virtual memory works, or what DNS is, or how computers store files on disk.

Wait until you encounter how chromeos enterprise is managed.

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