Hacker News Reader

Comment by elorant | Hacker News Reader

Open Source products are now technically superior

Name one open source IDE which is superior to Visual Studio. Or an open source database that is better than SQL Server. Not to mention C# which imho is the best language out there (arguably .NET though isn’t that good). I won’t argue that there are aspects of the ecosystem that can’t hold a candle to open source solutions especially in the administration tools area.

As for community, have you bothered to take a look at MSDN? There is an insane amount of free information online for their APIs. In terms of documentation MS is light years ahead of everyone.

Lastly, the “Windows/Microsoft is irrelevant” argument is very prevalent amongst our ranks but only there. MS might be irrelevant in our industry but in the enterprise, where by the way the big bucks are, they’re dominant.

View on HN

>Name one open source IDE which is superior to Visual Studio.

Here's a list in no particular order of open source editors/IDEs I would use over Visual Studios.

1. Vim.

2. Atom.

3. Brackets.

4. LightTable.

5. Codebox.

6. Slap.

> Or an open source database that is better than SQL Server.

Depends on what you mean by better and what compliance you need I guess? MongoDB can provide benchmarks better than SQL Server.

> Not to mention C# which imho is the best language out there...

Language preferences obviously change based on the needs of the developer. I prefer javascript just because I need a language that can run anywhere and I prefer prototypal inheritance over classical.

> In terms of documentation MS is light years ahead of everyone.

What about MDN?

I use vim and brackets (in addition to Visual Studio), but is codebox even an editor? I thought it was just a snippet organizer. Also, Atom can't open files greater than 2MB at the moment.

Even as a vim user, this post has lifted my sides into the orbit.

> Or an open source database that is better than SQL Server.

Erm... PostgreSQL?

Or at least on par with.

http://www.pg-versus-ms.com/

Very good writeup, thanks

The OSS IDE community is trapped between eclipse, emacs, and vim...these projects are all based on mostly stale ideas and I'm pretty sure when the right project starts with better ones, you'll see great open source IDEs that compete with and even surpass VS. Perhaps lighttable is that, but it's too early to say.

It's just that IDE developers would want to eat as well. For some reason open-source only works for frameworks and libraries. But it works really great for them!

> Name an open source database that is better than SQL Server.

OK I'll name two: SQLite and MongoDB. I suspect that both of these are better than SQL Server on criteria I care about: ease of deployment on Linux systems, lack of issues around licensing.

If you dont care about robustness, not losing data, etc there are a lot of great databases out there.

> ease of deployment on Linux systems, lack of issues around licensing

Midnight Commander or Emacs is better than SQL Server if those are the criteria you care about.

PostgreSQL?

I'm probably working in different environment than you, because I have never seen SQL Server used, when we want something with support we use Oracle.

> MongoDB

Have you ever used SQL server and do you know what type of problems it aims to solve?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com