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Comment by Niten | Hacker News Reader

I am by no means a Microsoft fan or Windows developer, but if auto-generated code is that big of a deal to the author then he really needs to spend some time playing with Visual Studio...

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Rails generators create the code you would write anyways. The MS generators created technical debt. Highly duplicated, ridiculous inclusions, questionable formatting and regions by default. It literally generates a code sample of what not to do if you want to write good code in C# (presumably VB as well).

ASP.NET MVC is really lights years ahead of other ways of building .NET apps, and is conceptually close to Rails in many ways. (Alas, its backstory is very OSS and un-Microsoft)

I think this statement requires further explanation.

Some of the generators for MVC are getting closer to rails. They are still pretty painful. T4 templates (commonly used in some of the nicer generators from nuget pacakges) requires EntityFramework. Furthermore, the templates themselves are very temperamental to create (tabs are not adhered to, nor spaces).

The real reason rails generators work so nicely is that most of the components are known. MS pushes entity framework hard, but it isn't included by default. If you don't know what IOC is being used you cannot generate a controller. If you don't know the ORM, you cannot generate a model. Don't even get me started on the fact that most of the community doesn't even use either of those two.

Auto-generated code is great - I'm more questioning if it's causing learning gaps when people try to move to languages that don't have the community or commonality as Ruby/Rails.

Ruby seems to be an anomaly in that you can pretty much obscure away the hard parts of building a web application, but have it still be programming. If a programmer starts with Rails, does that impact their ability to eventually go on to other things?

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