Thank you for a well thought out response. One of your up-votes is me.
I understand where you're coming from and I don't see your viewpoint as wrong. Mine is different. I see programming as part of an art, the way applying paint is part of creating a painting. It is by-far not the only part.
I totally agree that a good programmer should branch out and gain a better understanding of the world, but I believe the branching out should happen in a different direction.
To call someone that writes books a writer is an oversimplification of their job. Writers, like programmers, specialize. One writer might write non-fiction books in English in the murder mystery genre for an adult audience. This writer has had to develop a solid experience in and handle of the English language. They have had to research and understand murderers, the law and police. They need a solid handle on psychology to be any good. They need to understand the implements of murder. They need to understand the standard plot points of their genre, and how far they can be bent (to interest readers) before they break (and turn readers away). They need to understand pacing, and how to capture an audience's attention consistently. How to keep their material accessible to expand their audience as much as possible, or how to narrow their focus to be a must read for a certain niche. They must know how to get published and avoid getting swindled. Putting words on paper is only a very small part of their job.
If our hypothetical writer is going to branch out into new areas, he's more likely to gain success writing a sci-fi novel (where he can reuse most of his skill) or starting his own publishing company than he is in learning French to write books for the French audience.
Learning basic French is not hard, but it is very hard to know French like a native French speaker (an expectation of your French readers). If he is thinking in English and writing in French, his efficacy is already compromised. If you are writing for the French audience, you will have to take French customs and the French psyche into account. French readers are likely very different from the ones he’s used to, so he needs to understand the psychology and mind-set of his audience and his characters. Publishing a book in France is also likely completely different, with different ways to lose money in a book deal. Learning basic French will only help our writer when he needs to integrate a French character into one of his books.
It would be a little silly to tell a writer that he needs to identify as an English writer if he doesn't know French.
I make consumer products. I am a .net platform developer. I started my career as a designer 14 years ago; and soon realized that there is too much compromise in just graphic design. Every design I submitted at the company I worked for had to be changed (often dramatically) to fit within technical limitations. My designs were created to appeal to my audience, and due to technical limitations, that appeal was compromised. I had already been programming at home for a few years, and decided it was time to become a professional. The second month at my design job I asked to be put on the programming team as well. At the time, we were writing in legacy ASP. I never had a design compromised by technical limitation ever again. When .net was made available, I jumped on it immediately. I loved the ideas behind it and I couldn't wait to be a part of it.
A year or so later, I started realizing that the database design for a new product I was building was hampering my ability to write clean software (also due to “technical limitations”). I asked to be added to the Database team as well. I became a DBA. I was still a designer and developer. A year later, I became a PM as well, and so on.
At this point I have held the titles of senior .net architect, .net team lead, senior .net developer, senior MSSQL database architect, senior product manager, creative director, senior graphic designer, business analyst, and research scientist. I am always a .net developer, but in every job I've had at least two other titles as well. Each of these roles interface with the others, and knowing the others makes doing each of them much easier.
My job is to make quality consumer software. My job is to appeal to an audience. I learn whatever I need to in order to better appeal to that audience. As a whole my audience doesn't care what the software is written in. They care about whether or not it’s easy and pleasurable to use, whether or not it’s fast, intuitive, and solves their needs efficiently.
Now I have my own software company.
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WPF works, has a number of great features and tricks, and it’s fast if you’re using it right. I assume the developers on WPF moved to the Metro dev team when that ramped up; I don’t know. Maybe they’ll be back. My only issue with WPF is its half-hearted 3D support. Silverlight was an experiment, and it showed. It’s still possible to write great stuff on Silverlight, but the limited audience keeps it from being a solid solution unless you’re doing something that can’t be done as well using something different (DRM video for example) or you are creating an intranet application and have control over all of the machines that will be using your application. It’s a shame, but that future was easily foretold when it was announced.
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I don’t think you don’t have to master a language to understand its capabilities, but woe to he that tries to exceed them without having a solid understanding of what’s going on under the covers.
In my experience, .net shops are .net shops. Maybe I have been lucky.
In my experience it’s pretty easy to write your own wrappers for C++.
What sort of projects (other than projects targeting non-windows machines) have you encountered where you suggested not using .net?