Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Is an Open Source .NET Up To the Job?
Rob Y. writes:
The discussion on Slashdot about Microsoft's move to open source .NET core has centered on:
1. whether this means Microsoft is no longer the enemy of the open source movement
2. if not, then does it mean Microsoft has so lost in the web server arena that it's resorting to desperate moves.
3. or nah — it's standard Microsoft operating procedure. Embrace, extend, extinguish.
What I'd like to ask is whether anybody that's not currently a .NET fan actually wants to use it? Open source or not. What is the competition? Java? PHP? Ruby? Node.js? All of the above? Anything but Microsoft? Because as an OSS advocate, I see only one serious reason to even consider using it — standardization. Any of those competing platforms could be as good or better, but the problem is: how to get a job in this industry when there are so many massively complex platforms out there. I'm still coding in C, and at 62, will probably live out my working days doing that. But I can still remember when learning a new programming language was no big deal. Even C required learning a fairly large library to make it useful, but it's nothing compared to what's out there today. And worse, jobs (and technologies) don't last like they used to. Odds are, in a few years, you'll be starting over in yet another job where they use something else.
Employers love standardization. Choosing a standard means you can't be blamed for your choice. Choosing a standard means you can recruit young, cheap developers and actually get some output from them before they move on. Or you can outsource with some hope of success (because that's what outsourcing firms do — recruit young, cheap devs and rotate them around). To me, those are red flags — not pluses at all. But they're undeniable pluses to greedy employers. Of course, there's much more to being an effective developer than knowing the platform so you can be easily slotted in to a project. But try telling that to the private equity guys running too much of the show these days.
So, assuming Microsoft is sincere about this open source move,
1. Is .NET up to the job?
2. Is there an open source choice today that's popular enough to be considered the standard that employers would like?
3. If the answer to 1 is yes and 2 is no, make the argument for avoiding .NET.
1. whether this means Microsoft is no longer the enemy of the open source movement
2. if not, then does it mean Microsoft has so lost in the web server arena that it's resorting to desperate moves.
3. or nah — it's standard Microsoft operating procedure. Embrace, extend, extinguish.
What I'd like to ask is whether anybody that's not currently a .NET fan actually wants to use it? Open source or not. What is the competition? Java? PHP? Ruby? Node.js? All of the above? Anything but Microsoft? Because as an OSS advocate, I see only one serious reason to even consider using it — standardization. Any of those competing platforms could be as good or better, but the problem is: how to get a job in this industry when there are so many massively complex platforms out there. I'm still coding in C, and at 62, will probably live out my working days doing that. But I can still remember when learning a new programming language was no big deal. Even C required learning a fairly large library to make it useful, but it's nothing compared to what's out there today. And worse, jobs (and technologies) don't last like they used to. Odds are, in a few years, you'll be starting over in yet another job where they use something else.
Employers love standardization. Choosing a standard means you can't be blamed for your choice. Choosing a standard means you can recruit young, cheap developers and actually get some output from them before they move on. Or you can outsource with some hope of success (because that's what outsourcing firms do — recruit young, cheap devs and rotate them around). To me, those are red flags — not pluses at all. But they're undeniable pluses to greedy employers. Of course, there's much more to being an effective developer than knowing the platform so you can be easily slotted in to a project. But try telling that to the private equity guys running too much of the show these days.
So, assuming Microsoft is sincere about this open source move,
1. Is .NET up to the job?
2. Is there an open source choice today that's popular enough to be considered the standard that employers would like?
3. If the answer to 1 is yes and 2 is no, make the argument for avoiding .NET.
Seriously, get up to speed with your vernacular first. .NET is a branded CLI runtime, not a language - and perhaps more importantly not all apps/libs built for the CLI are necessarily compatible (you can write some perfectly elegant F# libraries that are a pain to use in C#, Boo, or IronPython - or worse, semantically broken w.r.t. common paradigms used in those latter languages).
Secondly, and I should note, I'm actually a C/C++/assembly developer (embedded systems / machine learning / computer vision mostly - most of my job is hand optimizing code to the instruction, manually deforesting data structures and optimizing cache coherency and memory access patterns, etc) - so I'm not at all a .NET zealot.
But secondly, .NET has been plenty capable for quite some time - there's this operating system, with millions of developers primarily using .NET now days, that has market dominance - writing business applications, web services, and hell - entire IaaS platforms, using just .NET.
There's entire companies built around it, providing cross platform technology for games (Unity), mobile application development (Xamarin), IaaS (Microsoft's Azure), there's even entire games built in it (eg: The Sims 3, set genre world records in sales) - all of which are decent products (even if they don't appeal to you).
What kind of a fool are you to have dribbled this shit? Did you think at all about the current state of the development world before presenting this question, seriously? How hard is it to use Google and figure out current trends, weigh up the pros/cons, etc for yourself?
For someone who's been around 62 years, you don't seem to understand human behaviour nor development patterns and trends very well. People will use the best tool for the job, what constitutes as 'best tool' depends very much on individual needs - standardisation is one very small part for a lot of companies (especially larger ones w/ enough in house expertise to do whatever they need doing).
Ignoring all of that, your entire premise is a generalisation about employers - presumably biased on your own personal history.
Not all employers prefer standardization if it means making sacrifices, not all employers are naive enough to think following the crowd absolves them of making the wrong choice, and there's even employers who would never even consider outsourcing. Greedy employers or not, some employers are smart enough to make their own decisions based on their own requirements - not based purely on projected monetary balance sheets in 'perfect world' scenarios.
I smell a shill. .NET is being phased out in a LOT of places, particularly the (very) large companies I consult for. There are a handful of holdouts, but they will likely end up carrying it all the way to their demise if they don't switch away soon.
And the primary argument against .NET is that it is a Microsoft product, and it's hard to convince beaten developers to come back to a sinking ship.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
This is one of the stupidest posts I've seen in a while. 1) Java's performance is fantastic. It's one of the fastest languages on the planet. I don't ever run into performance problems where the cause is Java. Ever. It's almost always some database bullshit. I work for one of the highest trafficked websites on the planet so I know a thing or two about performance. 2) .NET has the best IDE? ROFL. IntelliJ makes Visual Studio look like a piece of shit. In fact, JetBrains (the maker of IntelliJ) makes ReSharper just so the losers stuck with Visual Studio can learn how the other half lives. JetBrains makes a fortune on that product. Finally, the security holes you mention revolve around client-side Java. Who fucking uses that anymore? Nobody.
In short, not a single one of your arguments is even remotely accurate. Not surprising because all of you .NETers don't know jack shit about what happens in the developer world outside of what Microsoft shoves down your throat.
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?