Rob Conery's Blog

I Find Your Lack Of Faith… Invigorating

Sometimes I link to controversial stuff and a weird thing happens: it’s as if I wrote it myself! I linked to a post by Ken Egozi earlier today and pretty soon I was being told that I’m feeding the troll mill, that “I know a guy who left .NET and came back” etc. 

I can dig it. I didn’t have the intention of skewering .NET really - to me it’s a given that people are gravitating away from .NET. It *is* an older framework and the stuff coming out is pretty neat (Node, Rails, etc… even though Rails isn’t all that new).

I deleted the post as people were posturing as if *I* was going off. It was a link. The defensiveness… it’s insane sometimes.

So I thought I’d clarify my point a bit more.

This reply to me says it all:

YES! Good for you! And I agree completely with this (as I mentioned in the comments on the last post) - go where the work is. Don’t blind yourself with some silly bias.

There’s a lot of work in .NET - it keeps me employed with Tekpub as well as with some other contracts. Do I enjoy it as much as Rails? No - but that’s just me and my opinion - and it’s mine to have. Yay for free thinking!

Language CHOICE is a subjective thing. Some like Ruby (like me), some don’t. If you don’t - you’re in good company. If you do, you have your reasons.

I referenced a statement in my last post that I’ve seen evidence of (here’s the statement and the link):

Why is it a pattern that, … people try out Rails, and they just never come back?

This quote is from Ben Scheirman - from a presentation he gave to a .NET User Group. The talk is about something that I’ve seen a lot of: Rails Envy.

If you’re a .NET dev you might have skipped down to the comments to tell me how you tried Ruby and don’t like it. How you know a guy who tried it for a few years and came back and how I’m full of crap.

I Don’t Care. Rails Envy is real - to say otherwise is kind of silly.

Ben’s presentation is about the people who have tried Rails and really like it - and they tend to be many. I know a huge number of people who’ve “left .NET” - I also know a large number who still do .NET work because it pays.

That’s them. They don’t have much to do with you and your choices. 

Any given month of the year I’m primarily doing Rails work. Any given month of the year I’m primarily doing .NET work. This makes me a capitalist I think. I’m lucky in that I work for myself - I have a business where I can choose the stuff I use to build the business - and I do contract work as well.

Just over half of what I do is .NET work. I enjoy it - and I mostly enjoy pushing the features of .NET to see what’s capable.

But I enjoy Ruby work more (Rails, Sinatra, whatever) - I like Vim and I like the speed at which I can create things with Rails and Sinatra. I like being in the middle like this because I don’t react when I see someone going off on .NET.

Because I don’t really care. .NET’s not going to go away because Peter Seales makes some observations and rounds up some interesting quotes.

I also don’t care much when people respond - though I find it somewhat entertaining. OK I lied: I mostly don’t care. There are some things, however, that catch my eye (as with Ken’s post).

There are the usual disclaimers “I’ve used Rails and Python and PERL”, then there’s the postulations “It’s just as hard to do things in [Other Framework]” and then there’s the justifications (emphasis mine):

Far from being a fanboy MS (with regards to server dev tools) has loads to offer. C# is wildly more advanced and feature rich than any other mainstream language, and the upcoming things in c#5 making it even better. And the BCL of .NET is better and richer than perhaps any other built-in class library today in orders of magnitude. The VM , typesystem and core runtime are very robust and filled with features.  Real features, like the advanced concurrency controls etc. So, true that Rails comes with nice sugars that appeal to some people, but once you need to do more than “read from DB render to html” you start hitting walls

And see that… see that there? That thing right there - yep I care about that. That’s silliness. Sure I think C# has some great stuff - is it the BEST EVAR? Well… that is a subjective thing isn’t it?

Thus my last link, and my last post.

It’s claims like this that puzzle me - not out of some desire to defend Rails - but because the author felt he needed to make these claims.

If you truly feel that C# is THE BEST THING EVAR - I mean feel it to your bones and believe it forever - does it need a defense?

Full disclosure: I like C# too. I think it’s pretty damn powerful. 

Hey it’s Ken’s blog. He felt the need to stick up for C# and .NET and good for him. I’m sure .NET would thank him if it could.

I think Ken would be better off letting posts like that go. Competition is good for the marketplace no? Redmond should fear Ruby and Rails - they’ll keep making their stuff better. 

That’s the idea at least.

Or you could just tell me to shut the fuck up so I don’t scare people away:

Elitism indeed.