This week was my second week working on a Ruby on Rails project. Even though I am thoroughly enjoying Ruby on Rails (more on this later), I’m not going to use this as an excuse to blast .NET, the .NET community, and anyone else associated with .NET.
I really don’t see how posts like this one do any good at all. You may be tired of Microsoft’s stance on things, and you might be tired of working with people who don’t share your values, and that’s legitimate. You may want to work on a platform like Ruby on Rails that you feel is going to make you more successful. But that doesn’t mean that you should go out in a blaze of glory and tear down everyone and anyone associated with .NET.
If you don’t like .NET, you have two choices, you can change your platform (i.e. switch to something like Ruby) or change your platform (i.e. make the .NET world better). There are a lot of people doing the latter, and to slam the entire .NET culture does these people a big disservice. I am very thankful for these people because they are making the .NET platform much better, and I’ve reaped the benefits of this over the years.
This post was initially prompted by this tweet from Jeremy Miller:
I don’t think there’s anybody more self-righteous and condescending than a .Net turned Ruby developer.
Seeing that 27 people have retweeted that, that tells me that he’s not the only one who is hurt by all of the anti-.NET sentiment.
A lot of people in the .NET community don’t agree with how Microsoft does things and what they stand for, and I fall within that group. I would rather see Microsoft spend less time on things like Microsoft.Data and LightSwitch and spend more time promoting good developer practices (like TDD), helping to create some kind of .NET package management system (like Ruby’s gems), SQL migrations (like Ruby’s rake), and the like. If you want to blast Microsoft for stuff like this, be my guest. They’re a for profit company, so they can act like big boys and take the criticism. But please don’t aim that venom at all of the good people in the .NET community who are spending a lot of their free time to make the .NET platform better.
When you’re right, you’re right… and you’re right!
Make that 28 retweets. I’m all about ‘right tool right job’, so I totally agree with you. Some of the attitudes from ‘rubyists’ smack too much of fanboyism/elitism and it really makes a very good toolset (ruby/rails/rake) look really unappealing.
Just noticed your red-green-refactor icon in the left sidebar, like it!
The post you linked to really spoke to me. I’ve even said things that are similar. Now, I’m nowhere near the point where I’d leave .Net, because I still love it quite a bit, but my frustration is growing.
I don’t think the guy was taking down all of .Net. Whenever someone makes a generalization like he did, I think it goes without saying that he’s not talking about every .Net developer. I certainly know he wasn’t talking about me, because I’ve said similar things. And he also made sure to thank the people that were trying to make .Net better.
I think the target was aimed at the people who are not making .Net better — the people who are serving more like a weight holding things back. There are a growing number of people who have great ideas, who want to improve .Net, who want to share their work, etc., but I think there are some who are perfectly content with doing things their own way. They’d be more content creating their own private project that reproduces what someone else has done instead of forking a GitHub repository and sharing the updates. There are people who will never TDD. There are people who knock out tools like ironruby, rake, and cucumber because “I don’t like it.” They just aren’t getting caught up in the self-improvement, professionalism wave that has been going through the software development wave the past few years.
Part of me thinks this is a “greener grass on the other side” matter, but I don’t think this is about Ruby or Ruby programmer arrogance. I don’t even think it’s about Microsoft. It’s about us, where we want to go, and what we want to be, and the fight is still raging. If we demand that we do better, things will get better. And things *have* gotten better. But sometimes it’s tiring to have to continually debate the merits of TDD, right?
No epic rant? Oh, you’re no fun! :)
Actually, I really like what Rob Conery said, “You don’t need to “leave” anything to learn something new – it’s not a trip to the moon. You’re a developer, know more than one thing.”
Hear hear. .NET can learn a LOT from the Ruby community, and I don’t have any problem with people jumping ship for greener pastures, but burning your bridges like that shows a lot of immaturity.