8 ms·

Nobody really gives a damn what you built your site in (why I chose asp.net).

87 points by hughesdan 16y ago

noonespecial 16y ago
The people who come along later to scale to those millions of users your site attracted might.
- cfinke 16y ago
  Is there any (standard) technology stack that has proven to be unscalable?
  - j_baker 16y ago
    Yes. The one you started out with is always unscalable.
    - kondro 16y ago
      I wish I could give you a 1000 up-votes for this. I'm so sick of hearing the rhetoric about language X not being able to scale. Repeat after me, if your app doesn't scale it is YOUR fault, not a language, platform or framework. Scalability is about design and implementation, not what tools you use.
    - gsivil 16y ago
      <no-sarcasm>Can you please explain that?</no-sarcasm>
      - j_baker 16y ago
        When you start out, you're designing your site in hopes that someone other than your mom is going to use it. Usually, all you need is an app server and a database. I you get successful, that won't cut it. You usually need to start adding more and more pieces and rethink some technology decisions you made originally.
        gsivil 16y ago
        Thanks! I think I understand why the initial design/technology decisions would rarely make it to a product that has to be largely scaled. This makes perfect sense for almost all cases. Do you think that there are technologies that are inherently more scalable than others, so if some body was initially choosing them would stand more chances to scale up in a non painful manner?
        j_baker 16y ago
        Bear in mind that developer experience and smarts count for more than anything else (if you don't have those yet, don't worry - they will come with time, patience, and effort). That said, I would say that languages and technologies that help you achieve a more modular design will help you scale more. This makes it easier to tear things out and move them around so you can alter your architecture much more easily than you would otherwise. And of course efficiency (in terms of code performance) doesn't hurt either, but I wouldn't choose something on that alone. If you can have efficiency and modularity, so much the better!
        sokoloff 16y ago
        Worry about the "nobody cares enough" problem long before worrying about the "oh crap, too many people care" problem. User apathy, aka "not enough traction" kills far more startups than inability to scale. Pick the ecosystem with which your company will be most efficient and agile, and cross the scaling bridge if you come to it. We've rewritten substantially all parts of our codebase and key infrastructure 2 or 3 times in the last 8 years. You'll get the pleasure of doing the same iff you have users...
        gsivil 16y ago
        I completely agree with you. I think that in the 99.99% of the cases the question of scalability is related with a pseudo-problem or at best a good problem to have.
  - mkr-hn 16y ago
    I recall twitter originally being written in something that proved unscalable, so they had to switch. Can't remember what it was though.
    - kondro 16y ago
      It was Rails and, it wasn't that it wasn't unscalable but because they did it wrong then, they hired a bunch of developers that knew nothing about Rails, so of course they moved a lot of new and core development to other technologies.
      - jarin 16y ago
        It also had a lot to do with the fact that at the time Rails sites mostly ran on lighttpd or Mongrel, which was notoriously crashy (god was originally invented just to restart crashed Mongrels). From what I understand, at the time ActiveRecord hadn't yet been rewritten in C, which was also a big bottleneck for them (not to mention trying to scale MySQL to an insane level of traffic). Nowadays, we have fancy stuff like Resque for background jobs, Passenger (aka mod_rails) for serving up Rails content, and a plethora of NoSQL databases.
        texel 16y ago
        ActiveRecord was never rewritten in C. Twitter's problems stemmed from the fact that they had written a realtime messaging system, but designed it like a microblogging platform. The design wouldn't have scaled well, regardless of the technology they used.
        jarin 16y ago
        Oh you're right, I was thinking of the MySQL bindings (don't know where the original ones are at) https://github.com/brianmario/mysql2/tree/master/ext/mysql2 https://github.com/brianmario/mysql2/tree/master/ext/mysql2
    - j_baker 16y ago
      They didn't actually switch. They still use Ruby on Rails. They do use more things like Scala now than they used to.
- tejaswiy 16y ago
  This is what I don't get. ASP.NET scales pretty well as Joel opines. Why do people think .NET is bad just because it feels enterprise-y? More: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWHfY_lvKIQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWHfY_lvKIQ
  - ChuckN 16y ago
    It scales well but the pool of people with the experience and inclination to run a major Internet site using .NET is small and more importantly, getting smaller. Nobody graduating with a CS degree in the States right now is excited to work with MS - it just isn't sexy right now. Sexy isn't everything, but it's not nothing either.
  - kondro 16y ago
    You're right, .NET (even though I despise it) scales as well as anything else. Scalability is much more about design decisions than language/platform choice. However, Joel Spolsky is a tool. Everyone I know and respect thinks he's a tool. He is a prime example of being successful because of being lucky, rather than being good. Do not quote Joel, he can't form a valid argument for a topic without circling back on himself to save his life.
    - MortenK 16y ago
      Whether Joel Spolsky is or is not a tool, lucky, good etc is completely irrelevant. He and the rest of the SE/SO team has built a highly scalable solution based on .NET. So in a discussion about scaling on .NET, it absolutely makes sense to listen to his experiences.
      - kondro 16y ago
        Actually, FogBugz is trivial to scale - there is never any more than a few dozen, to hundreds of users for any one project. And Copilot wasn't even envisaged or created by Joel, but was rather a project created by some interns. FogCreek doesn't innovate (they have a bug tracker and a remote support application based on VNC). Joel just happened to be one of the first to blog constantly about technology. He doesn't even allow comments on his posts because he doesn't want to have to deal with people contradicting him (not that he doesn't do an excellent job at this himself). There are so many great developers and businesses out there that you could use as an example to model your business and software on. Use them, not Joel. Let Joel's business and opinions fade away as other smart, innovative companies run rings around his ageing product suite.
- nostrademons 16y ago
  You almost always have to rewrite your whole system anyway to scale to millions of users. It doesn't matter whether it's PHP, Python, C++, or ASP.NET; it'll have to be rewritten. The real problem is the flip-side of something that the OP mentioned as an advantage: ASP.NET coders tend to be cheaper, less experienced, and hence less likely to know about some critical detail that'll boost adoption, whether it's usability or latency or security. As someone relatively inexperienced himself, the OP can't know what those things are, but it's highly likely that one of them will bite him. In other words, it's correlation, not causation. ASP.NET won't make your site suck. However, ASP.NET biases your talent pool towards developers who suck, and that will make your site suck.
  - mwdev 16y ago
    To me this sounds like my friends who didn't want to go to UT because it 'was too big'. The awesome thing about too big is that if you look hard enough you are almost assured of finding someone like you. Yes there are crappy c# developers. I've also seen some bad ass c#.
    - nostrademons 16y ago
      Right, "biasing your talent pool" doesn't mean that everyone in that talent pool sucks. There are certainly some very talented C#/.NET devs. The problem is that when you go to hire, you have very little information about just how badass a prospective dev is, unless you've worked with them before. So if you take a random dev out of the C# pool, chances are he'll be worse than a random dev in the Python pool. http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html
      - kenjackson 16y ago
        So if you take a random dev out of the C# pool, chances are he'll be worse than a random dev in the Python pool. That was probably true in 1995. But not today. Python has become the new Pascal/Java. Commonly the intro language in CS, so you have a lot of students who graduate using Python regardless of skill. If you said Haskell, then probably. Actually C++ maybe more then either, surprisingly.
- blake8086 16y ago
  Perhaps you would be interested in purchasing my Scaling Insurance? It costs a ton upfront, and it's likely to kill your nascent company, but if you ever make it big, you'll save a tiny bit of money in the long run!
  - arethuza 16y ago
    Call them Scaling Default Swaps - insurance is regulated!
j_baker 16y ago
I disagree. For starters, I care what I build my site in. I'd have a lot more fun using say python or (if I'm lucky) lisp or Haskell than I would using PHP. And more fun = easier. Secondly, developers who might join your company are going to care. Developers are more than the technologies on their resumes. Good ones can learn new technologies quickly. And they might even be happier learning something new. This view is typical of business people. There isn't anything wrong with that, and it's necessary to a certain degree. But as he scales up, I hope that he can find someone who can help him make a more informed technical decision. (And for the record, this isn't necessarily targeted at ASP.NET. I can think of worse technologies to work with)
- krisrak 16y ago
  It does not matter what you build, you can achieve the same with using either PHP, Python, Ruby or ASP.NET. I choose Python/Google App Engine, free hosting is what was important for me, so I learnt a bit of Python to build me sites http://initlabs.com http://initlabs.com
  - j_baker 16y ago
    I agree. From the standpoint of what you can build a product using alone, any one of those is a good choice. However, I've learned that readability, along with being fun and efficient (from a developer productivity standpoint), is important, and the language makes a huge impact on all of these. I would argue that you can make say PHP readable, but it isn't necessarily going to be fun or efficient (but if someone can get all of those things, more power to them).
- xpaulbettsx 16y ago
  "And more fun = easier." That's the thing though - you and I think programming is fun and awesome, whereas this guy thinks business is fun and awesome, and programming is just a means to do what he wants to. What I think is a valuable lesson here though, is that he stayed focused on his goal of "put out the site", whereas with hackers it's easy to have a real goal of "Use technology X and write some awesome code" with a tertiary goal of "ship a product". Always be focused on getting your product out the door, even if you don't make perfect technical decisions.
kondro 16y ago
As a newbie, you are as likely to write shit asp.net code as you are any other code.
ChuckN 16y ago
And people do give a damn about somebody who rants and curses in his blog post.
mwdev 16y ago
I'm doing the same. I'll give a shout out to appharbor. They have made it insanely easy and cheap(as in free) to deploy a .net app. ...and here is a little secret that they may or may not want you to know...if you don't have the MS tools, it doesn't really matter. You don't even have to have windows. They build the code for you. You could used notepad to write an ASP.net app on their platform. Push. Test. Repeat.
- xpaulbettsx 16y ago
  Yep - and MonoDevelop will run ASP.NET just fine on any platform, or just use gVim and make
staunch 16y ago
The right answer is almost always to go with what you know best. As long as what you know best isn't completely ridiculous it will be the least of your problems.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
jfm3 16y ago
Article should be called "I should not have built my site in ASP.NET, but it's too late now, so I'm going to rationalize it as follows."
makmanalp 16y ago
> It’s not about the quality of the talent. It’s a simple supply and demand question. Uh oh. "Programmers are a commodity" again.
- hughesdan 16y ago
  I was trying to make the point that from my vantage point the talent pools are deep in each camp. Bad choice of words on my part.
  - alnayyir 16y ago
    >the talent pools are deep in each camp That doesn't really matter if in the PHP and .NET world you have to filter through 10,000 people to find somebody of the same median grade as you'd find in haskell/python/ruby/clojure. I'm exaggerating for effect, but the take-home here is that if you don't have unlimited resources you need to have some way to differentiate and filter from the guys offering the sweet vacation packages and steady career options. How exactly are you differentiating and filtering for higher quality people if not by technologies and developer freedom? Do you have nice offices ala 37signals? Are you an advocate of developer 'rights' such as Joel has been known to enumerate? Why exactly should a dev tolerate using VisualStudio and Windows for the sake of working on your company?
    - mkramlich 16y ago
      Exactly. I know a recent startup that did their initial build-out in Lisp. Then the CTO left, for whatever reason, and then the remaining leadership team seemed to decide to rewrite the stack in Java. They probably thought, "Hey it will be easier to find people." Yes, it will be easier to find bad people. Are their great Java people? Of course. But the total number of resumes you're going to have to wade through, and the ratio of bad to good, is going to be much higher with Java than with Lisp.
      - alnayyir 16y ago
        Moving from .NET to open source improved the quality of code and people I worked with. A lot. >rewrite the stack in java A rewrite was a bad idea to begin with. They shot themselves twice in the same leg. GG guys.
groby_b 16y ago
Whatever you chose - is it really a good plan to write an article that amounts to "my startup was written by somebody who's new to coding in general. And the whole point is to flip it" ? (Yes, I believe "exit strategy" is a fancy word for "built to flip".)
jonpaul 16y ago
Although I agree with the point that customers don't give a shit about the technology stack, did it seem to anyone else that he may be a little self-conscious about his choice of choosing ASP.NET? Read every single point. They all mention why he chose ASP.NET. Edit: why the downvotes? I'm not saying that ASP.NET is a bad language. I'm just saying that his title doesn't agree with what he wrote.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
jswinghammer 16y ago
I think ASP.Net is a pretty smart move even if you do have a strong CS background and know a few other platforms. The basic reason is that Microsoft stuff performs really well and you won't have to worry about a lot of problems for a very long time. Chances are one or two webservers will handle your page requests for quite some time before you need to start thinking about it. ASP.Net's sessions also work very well with server farms without much work beyond configuration you just need to follow a few rules and it works great. Assuming you went with SQL Server 2008 then chances are your database is going to perform very well for quite some time. A DBA or consultant can come in when things get tough but any senior level developer who tries to act cool by pretending to be a DBA can keep things moving along until you have cash to pay someone to really make sure things scale well. Plus no one cares. If your startup is moderately cool getting C# developers won't be tough either. I've met plenty of great C# developers so they're definitely out there.
- j_baker 16y ago
  To be clear, there are valid reasons to use C#. I just don't think "nobody cares, besides C# developers are cheap and easy to find" is one of them. (and while I'm leaving a comment anyway, I might as well apologize for the accidental downvote)
- japherwocky 16y ago
  By what metric does Microsoft stuff perform really well? You're seriously saying you choose Microsoft for performance and stability? And you have a dozen upvotes?
  - nostrademons 16y ago
    .NET actually isn't that bad as far as performance and stability go. It's about on par with Java. It's much faster than scripting languages, and significantly more stable than Ruby. Administering a Windows stack can sometimes blow, but the languages and virtual machines themselves are relatively solid.
    - kondro 16y ago
jrockway 16y ago
"I don't know anything about programming, therefore my first choice is best." Sure, that makes sense. (It also follows from this logic that cheap programmers are a good thing to have. If you need to do twice as much work, you just hire twice as many programmers! Combined with an IDE, you're sure to succeed!)
- tjogin 16y ago
  That's my go-to argument when choosing languages. Whenever someone says to use Java or .NET rather than the relatively obscure Ruby (or Node.js or whatever) because that makes it easier to find programmers, I always ask why they want to staff up on average to below average programmers. (Edit: sure there are good ones, just far more bad ones) At least if they use the obscure language, you know that the programmer in question has his eyes and ears out there, finding things out on his own, trying things, reading stuff. There are a lot of cubicle programmers who simply don't; that find out about things when things are added to Visual Studio. Not saying obscure languages are better in and of themselves (well, maybe just a pinch), just that the opposite isn't true. Easy access to droves of average to poor programmers is not a feature.
  - knieveltech 16y ago
    You're going to find the full range of talent regardless of which language you're using. Erlang doesn't guarantee godlike competence, and .NET doesn't guarantee mediocrity. I think your biases are showing a little here.
    - tjogin 16y ago
      I never said anything about a guarantee. I'm just saying that if you want to hire a programmer, the fact that there are thousands and thousands more of .NET programmers doesn't make hiring any easier. You want quality, not quantity.
      - wccrawford 16y ago
        Actually, it does make hiring easier. It doesn't making hiring -good people- easier.
Joakal 16y ago
For those who are a solo developer and get strange requests such as "I demand this to be in ASP/PHP/etc." With whatever language you use, program away and modify .htaccess file to display the desired extension of .asp/.php/.etc. I haven't yet wanted to try this but get tempted.
a5seo 16y ago
The biggest lesson I learned at my last startup is that your dev platform is an HR decision. After the fact, I realized it would have been smart to at least check Indeed Trends to find out how niche our platform was. If you aren't seeing many jobs asking for CodeIgniter, just to use as an example, don't count on finding a lot of developers. If you have a good company, you're better off competing for talent head-to-head on a rising platform. http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=codeigniter%2Ccakephp&l=Austin%2C+TX http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=codeigniter%2Ccakephp&...
- j_baker 16y ago
  It doesn't quite work that way. Strictly speaking, you will find more developers if you choose the technology of the week or some other popular thing. But that doesn't mean that you'll find more good developers. They're difficult to find no matter what technology you're working with. That said, you're on the right track as far as realizing that technology has an impact on who you hire. I would choose one more because it helps set you apart from other companies, not because it's what everyone else is using.
  - a5seo 16y ago
    Having inadvertently chosen something (almost) no one was using, except us, I mightily regret not doing a sanity check to get the big picture. It made hiring really expensive and slow.
- tzs 16y ago
  I'm a bit suspicious of their trends. It shows Perl significantly ahead of PHP, which is significantly ahead of Python. As a Perl programmer, I wish that were true, but I doubt it. It also has COBOL ahead of Python up until 2008. I am skeptical of that.
gfodor 16y ago
I find this juxtaposition pretty funny: "I made a list of likely acquirers and then looked at what kind of programming skills they hire for. It was clear they all favor Microsoft. All things being equal it seemed logical to do the same." and "At the end of the day things just have to work and customers don’t give a shit what technology you built your site on." If you're building a startup to "flip" it, isn't your future acquirer just as much a customer as your, er, customers?
- humblest_ever 16y ago
  yeah, what a misleading title. "nobody cares what language you use." "potential buyers like asp."
andrewtbham 16y ago
My personal experience is that the MS stack is tough for a startup because Sql Server can get expensive... especially if you want uptime. The feature to rebuild the indexes (without downtime) and do horizontal partitioning requires the enterprise edition... and it retails at 25k/processor. If you go with asp.net consider your budget before choosing sql server.
- sokoloff 16y ago
  Most places can take the few minutes of SQL blocking resulting from an index rebuild in standard edition. I know we often jump towards 5 9 solutions, because it feels like the "Right Thing(TM)" to do, but you can afford a lot of episodes of few minutes of blocking for what enterprise edition will cost... (we do run enterprise edition on our needed-by-cash-register DBs) I'm a big fan of MS-SQL, and would encourage people to think about the value of chasing that 4th nine of uptime. It doesn't make sense for most companies, IMO.
- Encosia 16y ago
  You can rebuild indexes in-place in even the free versions of SQL Server.
  - arethuza 16y ago
    I think he means online indexing http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/cc966402.aspx http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/cc966402.aspx
- arethuza 16y ago
  Nothing stopping you using another database server - I've started using CouchDB with an ASP.Net MVC application because I wanted documented oriented storage and it works perfectly well. MySQL seems to have plenty support, as does Oracle etc.
kevinpet 16y ago
I don't think a startup that is not fundamentally technical has much to say about the merits of different technologies. This is a startup, and it's innovative, but it doesn't rely on the technology. Technology is just one piece of the puzzle for this kind of company. The company could succeed even if the technology were junk. Let's say he had a competitor who had a similar business model. They're competing on pricing models, advertising, convenience of shipping methods, turn around, and, yes, convenience and reliability of the website. But the last one is only a deciding factor if there's nothing more important in the other factors. To summarize: nobody really gives a damn what you build your site in, if you aren't trying to do anything hard or innovative on the technology side.
- pestaa 16y ago
  Succeeding harder if the technology was junk is one assumption you might agree with. Furthermore, from your list, anything that's not business is technology. Not every company ships physically, and those who don't just ship their product through the stack. How fundamentally technical the startup is, is not decided by the owner but by the context. And technology matters there, a lot.
rit 16y ago
I noticed that both examples of companies he didn't want to compete with talent for (Tumblr and Etsy) are NY companies, so I wasn't surprised to see his company is in Hoboken (just across the river from Manhattan). The reality of course is in NY you're always competing for talent --- not just with the hot startups of the moment (Etsy, Tumblr, Foursquare, etc etc etc) but with the banks which are still paying big salaries for developers and solid benefits and bonuses. The truth here - whether the author thinks the technology or not matters - is that he isn't competing at all for programming talent. He is competing for the kind of people who want to work at a hot startup, and have that mentality, versus a small one man shop. His statement "Hiring quality coders on a bootstrapper’s budget is easier for ASP.NET than it is for anything open source. It just is. " is telling. Of course, its a completely unqualified unbacked statement. But understanding the reality of what your talent shortages are caused by is important. I get the feeling that he went with the first technology he could hire people for cheap enough with.
DjDarkman 16y ago
I feel that the author just didn't try any other technologies. > I found ASP.NET to be unmatched in terms of documentation I find this hard to believe. Again I think the author knows his way around Microsoft products, and is biased towards it. > Hiring quality coders on a bootstrapper’s budget is easier for ASP.NET than it is for anything open source. It just is. I find this statement self-justifying and false. If a product is more scarce than others than it will probably be more expensive, in other words: if there is bigger competition there are lower prices. The premise is true, no one cares about the server side technology expect maybe programmers who will have to build on that... wait what?
- kenjackson 16y ago
  > I found ASP.NET to be unmatched in terms of documentation I find this hard to believe. Why do you find it hard to believe? ASP.NET is really well documented. Is it absolutely the best documented product in the world, but it is reasonable that someone doing an investigation could reasonably believe that ASP.NET has the best documentation.
  - japherwocky 16y ago
    It's the choice of words, really. does it have good documentation, or thorough documentation? The author's argument would be twice as compelling if he backed such a strong statement up, or toned it down a bit. Unmatched? Mmmkay.
  - DjDarkman 16y ago
    I find it hard to believe if the author does not back it up with a lot of research and statistics. If the author would have just said 'it has great documentation' I would have said nothing about it, but when the compares it with others, he should have something to back it up.
    - arethuza 16y ago
      I think calling it "unmatched" is a bit strong, but generally I would say that the documentation of .Net is definitely one of its strong points.
dennisgorelik 16y ago
While Scott Guthrie is in charge of ASP.NET team -- ASP.NET would be a good choice (even though Microsoft overall is stagnating).
- superlogical 16y ago
  While Microsoft seems to be stagnating at the same time Mono and Linux is gaining huge popularity. Checkout these links http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Feb-14.html http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Feb-14.html IOS - IPod, IPad, IPhone: MonoTouch http://monotouch.net http://monotouch.net - Windows: Mono http://mono-project.com/Main_Page http://mono-project.com/Main_Page - Mac: MonoMac http://www.mono-project.com/MonoMac http://www.mono-project.com/MonoMac - Android: MonoDroid http://monodroid.net/ http://monodroid.net/ - Blackberry: MonoWebOs to be announced
mkramlich 16y ago
Your endusers may not care. Not directly. But they'll care when your site has problems or is slow. This part, in turn, is heavily influenced by the quality of engineers you have behind the scenes, and the choices they make. The nature/quality of your engineers will be influenced by what kinds of technical choices are in place at the time you start trying to hire them on. As a general rule, for example, a LAMP stack is going to attract a different mix than a Microsoft stack would. Lisp will attract different than PHP. Therefore, tech does matter. Does it matter as much as making a product people want and are willing to pay for? Probably not as much. But if/when the time comes and you want your site to scale, or have lower problem rate, then your engineers and your tech are going to matter.
- ThomPete 16y ago
  Pardon my ignorance. But isn't your site slow if you develop it wrong, not because you use the "wrong" language? I thought there where good developers in all programming languages and really bad ones too? For how many people is overnight success really the case? Most companies grow slowly over the years making scaling issues much less volatile.
mkramlich 16y ago
The absolute number one bottleneck in software-based startups right now is the availability, interest and affordability of good software engineers. The number and quality of engineers you're going to be able to attract will be heavily influenced by your tech choices upfront. There are some engineers who are so desperate they'll say yes to anything. There are others who have lots of choices and get to pick which to say yes too. In general, you'd rather have the second kind. So yes, tech does matter. The exact shade of the color blue you use in some image somewhere? Probably not matter too much. Your tech mix? Hell yes.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
japherwocky 16y ago
You know why you don't have a good reason for choosing a language? Because you are a total programming newbie who hasn't actually tried to use other languages for anything! If you use a better language, you will add features faster and spend less time fixing bugs, and you will be making the world a better place. Your logic is naive at best, and awful at worst: "It just is." isn't an argument anyone should take seriously.
timclark 16y ago
Nobody gives a damn but then he provides us with 4 debatable reasons why he personally chose a technology. Sure looks like he gives a damn to me.
pacifika 16y ago
Dan has all the qualities of a Microsoft employee - staff photo on blog (check), stripey shirt (check), called Dan (check), enterprisey design (check), wall of text (check).
middlegeek 16y ago
Wow, great insight for a fellow non-CS person who wants to build their own site anyway. I just subscribed to your blog. Thanks!
JSig 16y ago
My beef with .NET is that the platform and community does not feel very organic like it is with others. Making a huge generalization, I would say that the .NET community waits around for the Mother ship to produce something that it can use. This was one impetus for the ALT.NET movement. A great example of community in action is the castle project at http://www.castleproject.org/ http://www.castleproject.org/ In the year 2010, .NET finally has a package management system. Guess who created it?
- johns 16y ago
  It was first created by non-MS guys, and there are others out there by community members. MS decided to form an officially-endorsed open source project for NuGet. Pretty good model actually. It's a collaboration of MS employees and community members and they take outside contributions. Not sure what's wrong with that. It needed to be in VS to take off. The organic community is there, it's just not the dominant one but it has a significant presence.
  - JSig 16y ago
    >> It's a collaboration of MS employees and community members and they take outside contributions. Not sure what's wrong with that. I agree, nothing wrong with that. I think a lot of the stuff that MS has been doing under Scott Guthrie in recent years has been very good in regards to fostering a better community. >> It needed to be in VS to take off. Do you think NuGet would be successful if MS had not officially endorsed the project?
    - johns 16y ago
      Lots of things are successful without MS endorsement. If the integration had been as good as it was when it launched, yes. Only MS was willing to dedicate the resources to make that happen (VS addins, gallery site, etc).

87 points by hughesdan 16y ago

noonespecial 16y ago

The people who come along later to scale to those millions of users your site attracted might.

cfinke 16y ago
Is there any (standard) technology stack that has proven to be unscalable?
- j_baker 16y ago
  Yes. The one you started out with is always unscalable.
  - kondro 16y ago
    I wish I could give you a 1000 up-votes for this. I'm so sick of hearing the rhetoric about language X not being able to scale. Repeat after me, if your app doesn't scale it is YOUR fault, not a language, platform or framework. Scalability is about design and implementation, not what tools you use.
  - gsivil 16y ago
    <no-sarcasm>Can you please explain that?</no-sarcasm>
    - j_baker 16y ago
      When you start out, you're designing your site in hopes that someone other than your mom is going to use it. Usually, all you need is an app server and a database. I you get successful, that won't cut it. You usually need to start adding more and more pieces and rethink some technology decisions you made originally.
      - gsivil 16y ago
        Thanks! I think I understand why the initial design/technology decisions would rarely make it to a product that has to be largely scaled. This makes perfect sense for almost all cases. Do you think that there are technologies that are inherently more scalable than others, so if some body was initially choosing them would stand more chances to scale up in a non painful manner?
        j_baker 16y ago
        Bear in mind that developer experience and smarts count for more than anything else (if you don't have those yet, don't worry - they will come with time, patience, and effort). That said, I would say that languages and technologies that help you achieve a more modular design will help you scale more. This makes it easier to tear things out and move them around so you can alter your architecture much more easily than you would otherwise. And of course efficiency (in terms of code performance) doesn't hurt either, but I wouldn't choose something on that alone. If you can have efficiency and modularity, so much the better!
        sokoloff 16y ago
        Worry about the "nobody cares enough" problem long before worrying about the "oh crap, too many people care" problem. User apathy, aka "not enough traction" kills far more startups than inability to scale. Pick the ecosystem with which your company will be most efficient and agile, and cross the scaling bridge if you come to it. We've rewritten substantially all parts of our codebase and key infrastructure 2 or 3 times in the last 8 years. You'll get the pleasure of doing the same iff you have users...
        gsivil 16y ago
        I completely agree with you. I think that in the 99.99% of the cases the question of scalability is related with a pseudo-problem or at best a good problem to have.
- mkr-hn 16y ago
  I recall twitter originally being written in something that proved unscalable, so they had to switch. Can't remember what it was though.
  - kondro 16y ago
    It was Rails and, it wasn't that it wasn't unscalable but because they did it wrong then, they hired a bunch of developers that knew nothing about Rails, so of course they moved a lot of new and core development to other technologies.
    - jarin 16y ago
      It also had a lot to do with the fact that at the time Rails sites mostly ran on lighttpd or Mongrel, which was notoriously crashy (god was originally invented just to restart crashed Mongrels). From what I understand, at the time ActiveRecord hadn't yet been rewritten in C, which was also a big bottleneck for them (not to mention trying to scale MySQL to an insane level of traffic). Nowadays, we have fancy stuff like Resque for background jobs, Passenger (aka mod_rails) for serving up Rails content, and a plethora of NoSQL databases.
      - texel 16y ago
        ActiveRecord was never rewritten in C. Twitter's problems stemmed from the fact that they had written a realtime messaging system, but designed it like a microblogging platform. The design wouldn't have scaled well, regardless of the technology they used.
        jarin 16y ago
        Oh you're right, I was thinking of the MySQL bindings (don't know where the original ones are at) https://github.com/brianmario/mysql2/tree/master/ext/mysql2 https://github.com/brianmario/mysql2/tree/master/ext/mysql2
  - j_baker 16y ago
    They didn't actually switch. They still use Ruby on Rails. They do use more things like Scala now than they used to.
tejaswiy 16y ago
This is what I don't get. ASP.NET scales pretty well as Joel opines. Why do people think .NET is bad just because it feels enterprise-y? More: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWHfY_lvKIQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWHfY_lvKIQ
- ChuckN 16y ago
  It scales well but the pool of people with the experience and inclination to run a major Internet site using .NET is small and more importantly, getting smaller. Nobody graduating with a CS degree in the States right now is excited to work with MS - it just isn't sexy right now. Sexy isn't everything, but it's not nothing either.
- kondro 16y ago
  You're right, .NET (even though I despise it) scales as well as anything else. Scalability is much more about design decisions than language/platform choice. However, Joel Spolsky is a tool. Everyone I know and respect thinks he's a tool. He is a prime example of being successful because of being lucky, rather than being good. Do not quote Joel, he can't form a valid argument for a topic without circling back on himself to save his life.
  - MortenK 16y ago
    Whether Joel Spolsky is or is not a tool, lucky, good etc is completely irrelevant. He and the rest of the SE/SO team has built a highly scalable solution based on .NET. So in a discussion about scaling on .NET, it absolutely makes sense to listen to his experiences.
    - kondro 16y ago
      Actually, FogBugz is trivial to scale - there is never any more than a few dozen, to hundreds of users for any one project. And Copilot wasn't even envisaged or created by Joel, but was rather a project created by some interns. FogCreek doesn't innovate (they have a bug tracker and a remote support application based on VNC). Joel just happened to be one of the first to blog constantly about technology. He doesn't even allow comments on his posts because he doesn't want to have to deal with people contradicting him (not that he doesn't do an excellent job at this himself). There are so many great developers and businesses out there that you could use as an example to model your business and software on. Use them, not Joel. Let Joel's business and opinions fade away as other smart, innovative companies run rings around his ageing product suite.
nostrademons 16y ago
You almost always have to rewrite your whole system anyway to scale to millions of users. It doesn't matter whether it's PHP, Python, C++, or ASP.NET; it'll have to be rewritten. The real problem is the flip-side of something that the OP mentioned as an advantage: ASP.NET coders tend to be cheaper, less experienced, and hence less likely to know about some critical detail that'll boost adoption, whether it's usability or latency or security. As someone relatively inexperienced himself, the OP can't know what those things are, but it's highly likely that one of them will bite him. In other words, it's correlation, not causation. ASP.NET won't make your site suck. However, ASP.NET biases your talent pool towards developers who suck, and that will make your site suck.
- mwdev 16y ago
  To me this sounds like my friends who didn't want to go to UT because it 'was too big'. The awesome thing about too big is that if you look hard enough you are almost assured of finding someone like you. Yes there are crappy c# developers. I've also seen some bad ass c#.
  - nostrademons 16y ago
    Right, "biasing your talent pool" doesn't mean that everyone in that talent pool sucks. There are certainly some very talented C#/.NET devs. The problem is that when you go to hire, you have very little information about just how badass a prospective dev is, unless you've worked with them before. So if you take a random dev out of the C# pool, chances are he'll be worse than a random dev in the Python pool. http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html
    - kenjackson 16y ago
      So if you take a random dev out of the C# pool, chances are he'll be worse than a random dev in the Python pool. That was probably true in 1995. But not today. Python has become the new Pascal/Java. Commonly the intro language in CS, so you have a lot of students who graduate using Python regardless of skill. If you said Haskell, then probably. Actually C++ maybe more then either, surprisingly.
blake8086 16y ago
Perhaps you would be interested in purchasing my Scaling Insurance? It costs a ton upfront, and it's likely to kill your nascent company, but if you ever make it big, you'll save a tiny bit of money in the long run!
- arethuza 16y ago
  Call them Scaling Default Swaps - insurance is regulated!

j_baker 16y ago

I disagree. For starters, I care what I build my site in. I'd have a lot more fun using say python or (if I'm lucky) lisp or Haskell than I would using PHP. And more fun = easier. Secondly, developers who might join your company are going to care. Developers are more than the technologies on their resumes. Good ones can learn new technologies quickly. And they might even be happier learning something new. This view is typical of business people. There isn't anything wrong with that, and it's necessary to a certain degree. But as he scales up, I hope that he can find someone who can help him make a more informed technical decision. (And for the record, this isn't necessarily targeted at ASP.NET. I can think of worse technologies to work with)

krisrak 16y ago
It does not matter what you build, you can achieve the same with using either PHP, Python, Ruby or ASP.NET. I choose Python/Google App Engine, free hosting is what was important for me, so I learnt a bit of Python to build me sites http://initlabs.com http://initlabs.com
- j_baker 16y ago
  I agree. From the standpoint of what you can build a product using alone, any one of those is a good choice. However, I've learned that readability, along with being fun and efficient (from a developer productivity standpoint), is important, and the language makes a huge impact on all of these. I would argue that you can make say PHP readable, but it isn't necessarily going to be fun or efficient (but if someone can get all of those things, more power to them).
xpaulbettsx 16y ago
"And more fun = easier." That's the thing though - you and I think programming is fun and awesome, whereas this guy thinks business is fun and awesome, and programming is just a means to do what he wants to. What I think is a valuable lesson here though, is that he stayed focused on his goal of "put out the site", whereas with hackers it's easy to have a real goal of "Use technology X and write some awesome code" with a tertiary goal of "ship a product". Always be focused on getting your product out the door, even if you don't make perfect technical decisions.

kondro 16y ago

As a newbie, you are as likely to write shit asp.net code as you are any other code.

ChuckN 16y ago

And people do give a damn about somebody who rants and curses in his blog post.

mwdev 16y ago

I'm doing the same. I'll give a shout out to appharbor. They have made it insanely easy and cheap(as in free) to deploy a .net app. ...and here is a little secret that they may or may not want you to know...if you don't have the MS tools, it doesn't really matter. You don't even have to have windows. They build the code for you. You could used notepad to write an ASP.net app on their platform. Push. Test. Repeat.

xpaulbettsx 16y ago
Yep - and MonoDevelop will run ASP.NET just fine on any platform, or just use gVim and make

staunch 16y ago

The right answer is almost always to go with what you know best. As long as what you know best isn't completely ridiculous it will be the least of your problems.

deleted 16y ago
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jfm3 16y ago

Article should be called "I should not have built my site in ASP.NET, but it's too late now, so I'm going to rationalize it as follows."

makmanalp 16y ago

> It’s not about the quality of the talent. It’s a simple supply and demand question. Uh oh. "Programmers are a commodity" again.

hughesdan 16y ago
I was trying to make the point that from my vantage point the talent pools are deep in each camp. Bad choice of words on my part.
- alnayyir 16y ago
  >the talent pools are deep in each camp That doesn't really matter if in the PHP and .NET world you have to filter through 10,000 people to find somebody of the same median grade as you'd find in haskell/python/ruby/clojure. I'm exaggerating for effect, but the take-home here is that if you don't have unlimited resources you need to have some way to differentiate and filter from the guys offering the sweet vacation packages and steady career options. How exactly are you differentiating and filtering for higher quality people if not by technologies and developer freedom? Do you have nice offices ala 37signals? Are you an advocate of developer 'rights' such as Joel has been known to enumerate? Why exactly should a dev tolerate using VisualStudio and Windows for the sake of working on your company?
  - mkramlich 16y ago
    Exactly. I know a recent startup that did their initial build-out in Lisp. Then the CTO left, for whatever reason, and then the remaining leadership team seemed to decide to rewrite the stack in Java. They probably thought, "Hey it will be easier to find people." Yes, it will be easier to find bad people. Are their great Java people? Of course. But the total number of resumes you're going to have to wade through, and the ratio of bad to good, is going to be much higher with Java than with Lisp.
    - alnayyir 16y ago
      Moving from .NET to open source improved the quality of code and people I worked with. A lot. >rewrite the stack in java A rewrite was a bad idea to begin with. They shot themselves twice in the same leg. GG guys.

groby_b 16y ago

Whatever you chose - is it really a good plan to write an article that amounts to "my startup was written by somebody who's new to coding in general. And the whole point is to flip it" ? (Yes, I believe "exit strategy" is a fancy word for "built to flip".)

jonpaul 16y ago

Although I agree with the point that customers don't give a shit about the technology stack, did it seem to anyone else that he may be a little self-conscious about his choice of choosing ASP.NET? Read every single point. They all mention why he chose ASP.NET. Edit: why the downvotes? I'm not saying that ASP.NET is a bad language. I'm just saying that his title doesn't agree with what he wrote.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

jswinghammer 16y ago

I think ASP.Net is a pretty smart move even if you do have a strong CS background and know a few other platforms. The basic reason is that Microsoft stuff performs really well and you won't have to worry about a lot of problems for a very long time. Chances are one or two webservers will handle your page requests for quite some time before you need to start thinking about it. ASP.Net's sessions also work very well with server farms without much work beyond configuration you just need to follow a few rules and it works great. Assuming you went with SQL Server 2008 then chances are your database is going to perform very well for quite some time. A DBA or consultant can come in when things get tough but any senior level developer who tries to act cool by pretending to be a DBA can keep things moving along until you have cash to pay someone to really make sure things scale well. Plus no one cares. If your startup is moderately cool getting C# developers won't be tough either. I've met plenty of great C# developers so they're definitely out there.

j_baker 16y ago
To be clear, there are valid reasons to use C#. I just don't think "nobody cares, besides C# developers are cheap and easy to find" is one of them. (and while I'm leaving a comment anyway, I might as well apologize for the accidental downvote)
japherwocky 16y ago
By what metric does Microsoft stuff perform really well? You're seriously saying you choose Microsoft for performance and stability? And you have a dozen upvotes?
- nostrademons 16y ago
  .NET actually isn't that bad as far as performance and stability go. It's about on par with Java. It's much faster than scripting languages, and significantly more stable than Ruby. Administering a Windows stack can sometimes blow, but the languages and virtual machines themselves are relatively solid.
  - kondro 16y ago

jrockway 16y ago

"I don't know anything about programming, therefore my first choice is best." Sure, that makes sense. (It also follows from this logic that cheap programmers are a good thing to have. If you need to do twice as much work, you just hire twice as many programmers! Combined with an IDE, you're sure to succeed!)

tjogin 16y ago
That's my go-to argument when choosing languages. Whenever someone says to use Java or .NET rather than the relatively obscure Ruby (or Node.js or whatever) because that makes it easier to find programmers, I always ask why they want to staff up on average to below average programmers. (Edit: sure there are good ones, just far more bad ones) At least if they use the obscure language, you know that the programmer in question has his eyes and ears out there, finding things out on his own, trying things, reading stuff. There are a lot of cubicle programmers who simply don't; that find out about things when things are added to Visual Studio. Not saying obscure languages are better in and of themselves (well, maybe just a pinch), just that the opposite isn't true. Easy access to droves of average to poor programmers is not a feature.
- knieveltech 16y ago
  You're going to find the full range of talent regardless of which language you're using. Erlang doesn't guarantee godlike competence, and .NET doesn't guarantee mediocrity. I think your biases are showing a little here.
  - tjogin 16y ago
    I never said anything about a guarantee. I'm just saying that if you want to hire a programmer, the fact that there are thousands and thousands more of .NET programmers doesn't make hiring any easier. You want quality, not quantity.
    - wccrawford 16y ago
      Actually, it does make hiring easier. It doesn't making hiring -good people- easier.

Joakal 16y ago

For those who are a solo developer and get strange requests such as "I demand this to be in ASP/PHP/etc." With whatever language you use, program away and modify .htaccess file to display the desired extension of .asp/.php/.etc. I haven't yet wanted to try this but get tempted.

a5seo 16y ago

The biggest lesson I learned at my last startup is that your dev platform is an HR decision. After the fact, I realized it would have been smart to at least check Indeed Trends to find out how niche our platform was. If you aren't seeing many jobs asking for CodeIgniter, just to use as an example, don't count on finding a lot of developers. If you have a good company, you're better off competing for talent head-to-head on a rising platform. http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=codeigniter%2Ccakephp&l=Austin%2C+TX http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=codeigniter%2Ccakephp&...

j_baker 16y ago
It doesn't quite work that way. Strictly speaking, you will find more developers if you choose the technology of the week or some other popular thing. But that doesn't mean that you'll find more good developers. They're difficult to find no matter what technology you're working with. That said, you're on the right track as far as realizing that technology has an impact on who you hire. I would choose one more because it helps set you apart from other companies, not because it's what everyone else is using.
- a5seo 16y ago
  Having inadvertently chosen something (almost) no one was using, except us, I mightily regret not doing a sanity check to get the big picture. It made hiring really expensive and slow.
tzs 16y ago
I'm a bit suspicious of their trends. It shows Perl significantly ahead of PHP, which is significantly ahead of Python. As a Perl programmer, I wish that were true, but I doubt it. It also has COBOL ahead of Python up until 2008. I am skeptical of that.

gfodor 16y ago

I find this juxtaposition pretty funny: "I made a list of likely acquirers and then looked at what kind of programming skills they hire for. It was clear they all favor Microsoft. All things being equal it seemed logical to do the same." and "At the end of the day things just have to work and customers don’t give a shit what technology you built your site on." If you're building a startup to "flip" it, isn't your future acquirer just as much a customer as your, er, customers?

humblest_ever 16y ago
yeah, what a misleading title. "nobody cares what language you use." "potential buyers like asp."

andrewtbham 16y ago

My personal experience is that the MS stack is tough for a startup because Sql Server can get expensive... especially if you want uptime. The feature to rebuild the indexes (without downtime) and do horizontal partitioning requires the enterprise edition... and it retails at 25k/processor. If you go with asp.net consider your budget before choosing sql server.

sokoloff 16y ago
Most places can take the few minutes of SQL blocking resulting from an index rebuild in standard edition. I know we often jump towards 5 9 solutions, because it feels like the "Right Thing(TM)" to do, but you can afford a lot of episodes of few minutes of blocking for what enterprise edition will cost... (we do run enterprise edition on our needed-by-cash-register DBs) I'm a big fan of MS-SQL, and would encourage people to think about the value of chasing that 4th nine of uptime. It doesn't make sense for most companies, IMO.
Encosia 16y ago
You can rebuild indexes in-place in even the free versions of SQL Server.
- arethuza 16y ago
  I think he means online indexing http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/cc966402.aspx http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/cc966402.aspx
arethuza 16y ago
Nothing stopping you using another database server - I've started using CouchDB with an ASP.Net MVC application because I wanted documented oriented storage and it works perfectly well. MySQL seems to have plenty support, as does Oracle etc.

kevinpet 16y ago

I don't think a startup that is not fundamentally technical has much to say about the merits of different technologies. This is a startup, and it's innovative, but it doesn't rely on the technology. Technology is just one piece of the puzzle for this kind of company. The company could succeed even if the technology were junk. Let's say he had a competitor who had a similar business model. They're competing on pricing models, advertising, convenience of shipping methods, turn around, and, yes, convenience and reliability of the website. But the last one is only a deciding factor if there's nothing more important in the other factors. To summarize: nobody really gives a damn what you build your site in, if you aren't trying to do anything hard or innovative on the technology side.

pestaa 16y ago
Succeeding harder if the technology was junk is one assumption you might agree with. Furthermore, from your list, anything that's not business is technology. Not every company ships physically, and those who don't just ship their product through the stack. How fundamentally technical the startup is, is not decided by the owner but by the context. And technology matters there, a lot.

rit 16y ago

I noticed that both examples of companies he didn't want to compete with talent for (Tumblr and Etsy) are NY companies, so I wasn't surprised to see his company is in Hoboken (just across the river from Manhattan). The reality of course is in NY you're always competing for talent --- not just with the hot startups of the moment (Etsy, Tumblr, Foursquare, etc etc etc) but with the banks which are still paying big salaries for developers and solid benefits and bonuses. The truth here - whether the author thinks the technology or not matters - is that he isn't competing at all for programming talent. He is competing for the kind of people who want to work at a hot startup, and have that mentality, versus a small one man shop. His statement "Hiring quality coders on a bootstrapper’s budget is easier for ASP.NET than it is for anything open source. It just is. " is telling. Of course, its a completely unqualified unbacked statement. But understanding the reality of what your talent shortages are caused by is important. I get the feeling that he went with the first technology he could hire people for cheap enough with.

DjDarkman 16y ago

I feel that the author just didn't try any other technologies. > I found ASP.NET to be unmatched in terms of documentation I find this hard to believe. Again I think the author knows his way around Microsoft products, and is biased towards it. > Hiring quality coders on a bootstrapper’s budget is easier for ASP.NET than it is for anything open source. It just is. I find this statement self-justifying and false. If a product is more scarce than others than it will probably be more expensive, in other words: if there is bigger competition there are lower prices. The premise is true, no one cares about the server side technology expect maybe programmers who will have to build on that... wait what?

kenjackson 16y ago
> I found ASP.NET to be unmatched in terms of documentation I find this hard to believe. Why do you find it hard to believe? ASP.NET is really well documented. Is it absolutely the best documented product in the world, but it is reasonable that someone doing an investigation could reasonably believe that ASP.NET has the best documentation.
- japherwocky 16y ago
  It's the choice of words, really. does it have good documentation, or thorough documentation? The author's argument would be twice as compelling if he backed such a strong statement up, or toned it down a bit. Unmatched? Mmmkay.
- DjDarkman 16y ago
  I find it hard to believe if the author does not back it up with a lot of research and statistics. If the author would have just said 'it has great documentation' I would have said nothing about it, but when the compares it with others, he should have something to back it up.
  - arethuza 16y ago
    I think calling it "unmatched" is a bit strong, but generally I would say that the documentation of .Net is definitely one of its strong points.

dennisgorelik 16y ago

While Scott Guthrie is in charge of ASP.NET team -- ASP.NET would be a good choice (even though Microsoft overall is stagnating).

superlogical 16y ago
While Microsoft seems to be stagnating at the same time Mono and Linux is gaining huge popularity. Checkout these links http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Feb-14.html http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Feb-14.html IOS - IPod, IPad, IPhone: MonoTouch http://monotouch.net http://monotouch.net - Windows: Mono http://mono-project.com/Main_Page http://mono-project.com/Main_Page - Mac: MonoMac http://www.mono-project.com/MonoMac http://www.mono-project.com/MonoMac - Android: MonoDroid http://monodroid.net/ http://monodroid.net/ - Blackberry: MonoWebOs to be announced

mkramlich 16y ago

Your endusers may not care. Not directly. But they'll care when your site has problems or is slow. This part, in turn, is heavily influenced by the quality of engineers you have behind the scenes, and the choices they make. The nature/quality of your engineers will be influenced by what kinds of technical choices are in place at the time you start trying to hire them on. As a general rule, for example, a LAMP stack is going to attract a different mix than a Microsoft stack would. Lisp will attract different than PHP. Therefore, tech does matter. Does it matter as much as making a product people want and are willing to pay for? Probably not as much. But if/when the time comes and you want your site to scale, or have lower problem rate, then your engineers and your tech are going to matter.

ThomPete 16y ago
Pardon my ignorance. But isn't your site slow if you develop it wrong, not because you use the "wrong" language? I thought there where good developers in all programming languages and really bad ones too? For how many people is overnight success really the case? Most companies grow slowly over the years making scaling issues much less volatile.

mkramlich 16y ago

The absolute number one bottleneck in software-based startups right now is the availability, interest and affordability of good software engineers. The number and quality of engineers you're going to be able to attract will be heavily influenced by your tech choices upfront. There are some engineers who are so desperate they'll say yes to anything. There are others who have lots of choices and get to pick which to say yes too. In general, you'd rather have the second kind. So yes, tech does matter. The exact shade of the color blue you use in some image somewhere? Probably not matter too much. Your tech mix? Hell yes.

deleted 16y ago

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japherwocky 16y ago

You know why you don't have a good reason for choosing a language? Because you are a total programming newbie who hasn't actually tried to use other languages for anything! If you use a better language, you will add features faster and spend less time fixing bugs, and you will be making the world a better place. Your logic is naive at best, and awful at worst: "It just is." isn't an argument anyone should take seriously.

timclark 16y ago

Nobody gives a damn but then he provides us with 4 debatable reasons why he personally chose a technology. Sure looks like he gives a damn to me.

pacifika 16y ago

Dan has all the qualities of a Microsoft employee - staff photo on blog (check), stripey shirt (check), called Dan (check), enterprisey design (check), wall of text (check).

middlegeek 16y ago

Wow, great insight for a fellow non-CS person who wants to build their own site anyway. I just subscribed to your blog. Thanks!

JSig 16y ago

My beef with .NET is that the platform and community does not feel very organic like it is with others. Making a huge generalization, I would say that the .NET community waits around for the Mother ship to produce something that it can use. This was one impetus for the ALT.NET movement. A great example of community in action is the castle project at http://www.castleproject.org/ http://www.castleproject.org/ In the year 2010, .NET finally has a package management system. Guess who created it?

johns 16y ago
It was first created by non-MS guys, and there are others out there by community members. MS decided to form an officially-endorsed open source project for NuGet. Pretty good model actually. It's a collaboration of MS employees and community members and they take outside contributions. Not sure what's wrong with that. It needed to be in VS to take off. The organic community is there, it's just not the dominant one but it has a significant presence.
- JSig 16y ago
  >> It's a collaboration of MS employees and community members and they take outside contributions. Not sure what's wrong with that. I agree, nothing wrong with that. I think a lot of the stuff that MS has been doing under Scott Guthrie in recent years has been very good in regards to fostering a better community. >> It needed to be in VS to take off. Do you think NuGet would be successful if MS had not officially endorsed the project?
  - johns 16y ago
    Lots of things are successful without MS endorsement. If the integration had been as good as it was when it launched, yes. Only MS was willing to dedicate the resources to make that happen (VS addins, gallery site, etc).