Comment by pnathan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pnathan | Hacker News Reader

Hiya Sean,

So you posted a real classic flamewar topic here... heh. Enjoy the war. But here's my take on Microsoft Corp, since you asked nicely.

You guys don't play nice. You've never played nice, and the fact that you've gotten better lately seems to be more due to the fact that you've lost dominance and have to interop with other operating systems. I'm not really going to provide significant examples, there are lots out there for a quick search. Things like file formats, threading models, frigging slash directions in filenames, deviance in compiler standards. Not to mention that MS had a terrible rep for being aggressive and with bad ethics in the 80s and 90s (leaving aside the F/OSS fight).

Technically, I find MS offerings to still be catching up in automatability to Linux. Still. Not only that, but you have had since the 90s this obnoxious habit of having "moving targets" for your APIs. So learning one API just meant that I'd have to learn a new one to do the same thing in a year.

I've recently had the opportunity to do heavy .NET development, and my opinion is that as a developer whose worked for years in Linux, Microsoft technologies wasted my time comparatively. Everything from Windows 8 out to the shenanagins with IIS to actually get my webapp deployed. I was able to do equivalent work in Ruby on Rails (a language and framework I didn't know) in a fraction of the time I spent fighting C#, MVC API and IIS; this experience was repeated with Caveman and Common Lisp (a framework I didn't know, a language I did). I can not believe how painful it is to develop on Microsoft tooling, and how meekly people accept it as the way it is. I don't like having my time wasted.

I'm not going to say Apple or Google (or Oracle, SAP, etc, etc, etc) is blameless, okay? But I don't really like Microsoft policy and technologies, as a rule of thumb. Note that I really respect your arm of the company - MSR - and think that it does great stuff like F#, Pex, and others. That still doesn't obviate my dislike of MS as a corporation.

Regards, Paul

This post resonated with me. I love C#, but I refuse to use it. Much of the community is tied down to proprietary API's which would mean being sucked into the MS ecosystem, meaning I'd have to kill off over half my potential market. Microsoft makes some wonderful things, but only in reaction to their competitors. Almost everything they make is better. But that's the problem. As soon as they have you, you're trapped. Then it's down the rabbit hole, and you'll find bugs you can't fix. Hideous work arounds. Limitations that force upgrading products. You're going to get stressed.

I'm not a Linux, Google, or Apple shill; but I this is why I refuse to be pulled into the Microsoft ecosystem. I simply can't respect Microsoft as they are still blatantly trying EEE with mobile/ tablet/ laptop markets. It will be sad day if Microsoft actually achieves a monopoly on any of these markets, because they'll stop innovating. They'll come out with closed libraries that only work on their devices. They'll force you to do things their way.

I'm not delusional, MS competitors aren't saints. But they all never seem to stoop that low. Shit, even Google Chrome _asks_ you if you want to use Bing as a search provider.

> MS had a terrible rep for being aggressive and with bad ethics in the 80s and 90s

That's a really important consideration. Hackers have long memories, and a lot of us don't consider "it's just business" to be in any way a relevant defense.

Couple of things that might help you in dealing with the ASP.net stack:

REST - ignore WebApi and jump straight into ServiceStack. Deployment - Octopus is your best friend IIS - if you really hate IIS then run .net on Linux with Mono.

http://www.servicestack.net/ http://octopusdeploy.com/documentation/getting-started

Basically this, particularly that last part. MS Research is awesome, they do great work. People like Simon Peyton Jones are doing really cool stuff and really helping the industry grow. That said, MS proper is basically in the exact opposite business. It boggles my mind how you can have two groups inside the same company that are so completely in opposition to each other.

I work with ruby/rails, node.js/coffeescript, python, scala and some other stuff on a daily basis on my day job. Thanks to MSDN-AA, i had to work with the complete Microsoft-Stack at University the last year, given every single tool for free (including visual studio ultimate). Guess what? It was just a pain. I can't even describe in words how unproductive it feels to work with .NET when you are used to the latest "hipster"-stuff to get things done beautiful in minutes instead of hours/days. Not to mention that all the tools usually cost a few bucks if you have to buy it... i wouldn't. Thanks to the MSDN-AA program, I and most of my fellow students never want to touch Microsoft stuff again.

Microsoft spend huge affords to create nice stuff, but for decades they just don't get it. And i don't get why people working with .NET regulary stop complaining after a while and think that ugly workflows are "ususal".

Meh, some of the tools are like vim. Hard to get started, great when you know them. It sounds to me like you are hating because you didn't spend enough time using these things.

That's what I'm getting out of pretty much this entire post.

As an asp.net mvc developer by trade, I could easily say that it could take me hours/days to get stuff done in node.js/rails/django/name-your-framework, that I could otherwise get done in minutes in mvc. Of course, I'm self-aware enough to realize that it's because I have 4 consecutive years of experience with .net, but only a cumulative of maybe a few months in all other technologies (php/rails/python/c/c++) combined (not including school-work.)

That's a reasonable thing to say, but when I could get a RoR app developed in a fraction of the same time as MVC .NET, despite being ignorant of Ruby or Rails and MVC (I knew C# a bit beforehand), it was pretty much game over, RoR won.

I've worked with a lot of languages and a lot of frameworks over the years, and the ones from Microsoft are always hands down the most needlessly complicated and poorly documented of the bunch. PHP may be a double claw hammer, but at least it's a really well documented double claw hammer. MVC includes at least 5 different kinds of double claw hammer, a normal hammer, a combination hammer/chainsaw, a mislabeled jar of nitric acid, and a swiss army knife, and half complete and half accurate documentation of 2/3rds of it.

You like MVC because you've basically spent the time to find all the good bits and just pretend all the tons and tons of horrible bits don't exist. Good for you, but that also means anyone new to basically any MS tech has to spend years learning where all the mines are buried, when instead they could use basically any other tech stack in the world and not have to worry about navigating a mine field in the first place.

Oh, and just for fun every 5 years or so MS deprecates that particular mine field, lays a new one, and forces everyone to go play in the new minefield instead.

I disagree that MVC is not well documented, but perhaps I've just learned where the good documentation is (for MVC.)

That said, I have to agree that every time I've dived into PHP/RoR, there have been plenty of articles with well-drawn maps of the minefield (to borrow your analogy.)

> Oh, and just for fun every 5 years or so MS deprecates that particular mine field, lays a new one, and forces everyone to go play in the new minefield instead.

I know I started at the beginning with this new minefield (MVC came out less than a year before I started using it,) but I don't see this happening as much, at least not with MS's web offerings. The last version or two of MVC and EntityFramework have been OSS under Apache 2, so they can continue to be developed even if MS decides to go a separate route.

I understand that this is not the case for their desktop and mobile offerings, and that they have jerked their developers in that field around in different directions each time they come out with a new OS. I think that their web offerings are more stable. The only things that may change fundamentally are server components (IIS, SQL Server, MVC, EF, etc.), or the browser. If the browser changes, everyone's screwed; and if the server components change, the developer can simply decide to stay on older versions (until licenses run out, which I'll concede as one problem.)

And of course, all this flows back to documentation. PHP/Python/RoR have much better documentation because they're all much more widely used. If more people used MVC, more people would write about it, and there would be more documentation for it.

The only remaining issue is a pretty big one: cost. Yes, there's a VS Express Web Edition, but that has its own issues. So, you're left with BizSpark as the next best option. It's what I've done. I have 2 more years left before I have to decide whether to start paying. So far it's great, but I know that it's going to come back and bite me in the ass unless I start something profitable before then.

And I believe that that's the real reason that it's not more widely used; or at least the original reason, with lack of documentation and other MS-hate being secondary to and/or consequences of it. In a community where people have 5 ideas fail before hitting something profitable, it's hard to justify the extra cost of $1000 or more per developer, even if it's actually free for the first few years. Why risk paying $1000+ per developer and an extra $100+ per server 3 years from now, when you can start with something free and have it still be free 3 years from now? That's what it all boils down to.

I'll admit, I'm probably tossing in the towel on MVC soon. But it's not because of poor documentation or fear of being forced to switch to a new API requiring a large rewrite on my part. It's because 1) the IDE and servers are 5-10x more expensive than those for Python/Ruby/Node/PHP; and 2) everybody's using Python/Ruby/Node/PHP, so finding work is tough. After all, what good is working on a side project to show off my MVC skills, if nobody will hire me for it anyway?

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