Are .NET Developers the American Tourists of the Software Industry?
Comments(165) In case this post rides a reddit or Dzone wave, let me start out by saying that I am both from the United States and a .NET developer. Now on to my regularly scheduled point…
I’m fairly certain that most people would agree that
Microsoft as a company is despised by a sizable segment of the software industry.
Since corporate politics bore me, I’m going to skip the part about why this is the case or whether this view is justified. Instead, I’m going to focus on the following corollary:
The same segment of the software industry that dislikes Microsoft also views developers who use Microsoft tools and languages as inherently less skilled and less capable.
That is a nice way of saying that when the typical Java\Python\Ruby developer conjures up an image of a .NET developer, it probably looks something like my esteemed blog sponsor on the right sidebar. In other words, I believe that the prevailing stereotype about .NET developers is that we wouldn’t know a software best practice or sound computer science principle if it recursively bit us in the arse.
Why does this stereotype exist and is it deserved?
Some harsh reddit feedback on one of my recent blog posts prompted me to seriously ponder this question and after going through various phases of anger, denial, and rationalization, I finally settled on the following theory.
Developers who don’t earn their living from Redmond-based technologies dislike Microsoft developers for some of the same reasons that people from other countries dislike Americans.
For any of my fellow countryman who are surprised by this, it is true. Most people in the world don’t like you. I’m sure books could be written on all of the social, political, economic, and cultural offenses that we unknowingly dole out on a daily basis, but I’m just going to focus on the one psychological offense that I’ve observed first hand numerous times in my travels.
Americans are inherently annoying because we rarely invest any effort into learning anything about the external world.
For example, If you are an American and meet someone who is well educated from another country, then statistically speaking the chances are good that:
- You will not speak their language even though they will probably speak English.
- You will not be able to locate their country on a map even though they could probably name all 50 states.
- You won’t know who their national leader is even though they will not only tell you the name of our President, but also give you a nice summary of his foreign policy exploits over his last two terms in office.
You don’t have to have a political science degree to understand the psychological effects of this interaction. How did you feel the last time someone completely blew you off because you know they didn’t think you were important enough to bother with? Needless to say, it doesn’t help much on the diplomacy front.
I think a similar dynamic occurs with .NET developers who are so busy drinking from the firehose at Microsoft that they forget about the rest of the development world entirely.
The reddit comments that drove this home the most for me was the one said my opinion should be discounted because I “break the programming languages world into “languages by Microsoft” and “other languages”. Not a bad point.
Then there was my favorite wickedly sarcastic comment from Lepton3 (…come on reddit…you really need to de-anonymize this process a little). In response to my stated desire to learn finally learn Python, he quips… “Steady on there tiger! You wouldn’t want to rush in too soon.” A damn good point considering how long Python has been popular.
They both made me realize that despite my great efforts to study software best practices and learn no less than a dozen new Microsoft technologies in the last few years, I was still being pretty myopic in my approach to software development.
So, I hereby relinquish any guilt that I may feel for not keeping up with every new technology coming out of Redmond in the next several years. Instead, I’m going to do the programmer’s equivalent to a little world traveling so I can get better clued into what the rest of the software world has to offer.
I’m sure all the other kids will still make fun of me for feeding at the Microsoft teat, but at least I won’t stand out like a typical American tourist anymore.
Oh, and for all you .NET readers who may get inundated with posts on Ruby, Rails, Python, Django, and MySQL in the near future (at least that’s what I’ve been spending all my free time on in the last few weeks), hang in there. A little foreign culture is good for the programming soul. Also, since there’s no place like home, I’m sure I’ll continue to churn out .NET content as well.
Popularity: 100% [?]
Most people in the world may not like us, but whether they want to admit it or not they are better off because of us. Each time they turn on the TV or a personal computer, surf the net, talk on a telephone, drive a car, fly in an airplane it is a tacit endorsement of American culture.
I salute your resolution to broaden your technical horizon and wish you the best of luck. I also look forward to reading about it and hope that you will keep the self-loathing anti-American nonsense to a minimum.
Taking the high road. Good for you! Just remember that when traveling to exotic locations you may encounter customs that are somewhat different than your current norm and you may initially be frustrated. However, if you are open to new experiences there will be pleasant surprises in store for you.
@joe – I think it goes both ways – many of “you” are also better off because of “them”.
@Joe – I’m way too a-political these days to be self-loathing. I was a history major in college in a former life, so I’ve met my share of self-loathing Americans and I agree that it gets old really quickly.
I was just trying to draw on my past experience to explain why .NET developers get no respect and trying to objectively determine if there was any merit in the critique.
As in most cases, I believe the truth lies somewhere in between. Most Java/Python/Ruby developers don’t give .NET developers enough credit while most .NET developers are too isolated in their own world to see the true value of other technologies and languages.
In fact, I’ve met several .NET developers who had no idea that NUnit, Nant, and CruiseControl.NET were direct copies of tools that existed for several years in the Java space or that the new MVC framework is directly inspired by Rails,Django, and probably a dozen Java web frameworks that I have no idea about.
I can’t control what others think of me, but I can do my part to correct any of my own short-comings.
@Gavin – I know, it’s a really strange feeling for me, especially since I’m usually the one making the wickedly sarcastic quips…
[...] Are .NET Developers the American Tourists of the Software Industry? – An interesting piece, suggesting that we should all taste some foreign ideas from time to time. [...]
Brilliantly, the first comment by Joe demonstrates another reason why we find you annoying – because you seem to think that using devices such as the TV (Scottish), WWW (English) and the car (German) are “tacit endorsements of American culture”.
By the way, I’m English and have found all Americans perfectly charming.
[...] Are .NET Developers the American Tourists of the Software Industry? (I can’t believe they used my picture!) [...]
[...] Busy MS devs Great post here comparing .net devs to American tourists. [...]
[...] Are .NET Developers the American Tourists of the Software Industry? | Caffeinated Coder – “Developers who donâ??t earn their living from Redmond-based technologies dislike Microsoft developers for some of the same reasons that people from other countries dislike Americans.” – heh [...]
@Joe:
“Most people in the world may not like us, but whether they want to admit it or not they are better off because of us. Each time they turn on the TV or a personal computer, surf the net, talk on a telephone, drive a car, fly in an airplane it is a tacit endorsement of American culture.”
QED
Well, you have at least one new reader because of your desire to boldly explore new languages.
@Engtech – Glad to hear it. By the way, I just visited internetDuckTape.com for the first time and was duly impressed. Very interesting bio on the blog. I hope I can have as much success with caffeinatedCoder some day. Cheers!
[...] [CODE] Are .NET Developers the American Tourists of the Software Industry?, caffeinatedcoder.com, via:raganwald.com [...]
I’m guilty of looking down on .NET developers myself.
But for me it’s from the experience of 3 years as a .NET developer. I won’t say anything about my previous coworkers except their left hands have to be hurting from all the Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V. I finally got so sick of the culture and mindset and the complete distrust of anything not a Microsoft approved best practice/strategy when there are better alternatives.
So I quit my daytime and went to work for myself doing python development and enjoying the hell out of it.
I apologize in advance for not being terribly eloquent in my comment.
I’ve been a .NET developer for 5 years, and then I switched to do other things like wxWidgets, Linux, Rails, Django, etc. I’ve seen the same ratio of sound/noise in both sides when it comes to loathing and bashing against “the other side”, but I must say that I’ve found much smarter people in the open source world than in the M$ one. To summarize, I’m not looking back. But I follow what’s being done in .NET anyway.
Of course this is a personal opinion, based on my own limited experience, in some places of the world like Argentina and Switzerland.
“Most people in the world may not like us, but whether they want to admit it or not they are better off because of us. Each time they turn on the TV or a personal computer, surf the net, talk on a telephone, drive a car, fly in an airplane it is a tacit endorsement of American culture.”
Only one technology listed is an undisputed American invention.
Many TV shows shown in the US (e.g.: American Idol) are franchises created elsewhere.
A year ago I learned C# to take part in a big .NET project (my background is python & java) and initially was indeed somewhat surprised by the community’s isolation.
But then again, how many Java devs admit JSP is *at best inspired* by ASP?
j
Well, if I can add my 2c or (2p as am based in UK…) I think an important point of .NET vs rest of programming world has been ommitted – .NET has been designed as a powerful RAD platform and therefore differnet approach is taken while using it. In business devel time is money (as you should all know); and most people using open/alterantive techs tend to be more of idealists (therefore lose time on pointless tekkie undertakings). (Well, there is also the problem of corporate environments prefering properitary tech for reasons of servicing etc, a bit unfounded in my view) My brother is using .NET on everyday basis and amount of time he saves is just incredible. (Mind you he is an experienced developer – who started of years ago with pascal, asm, and C, went through Clipper (anyone remember that?) moved to delphi, and the MS Visuals). Ergo – yes I do think that .NET developers might come across as conceited, but think this way – why lose your time when you are paid for devel work, and the tools are there?! It’s not 1980s where you had to do some nifty code crunching. Or, maybe some of you guys still think that 640k should be enough for everyone?
As for American tourists, well, I’ve come across some v. positive examples and some very bad ones, it’s a matter what kind of person you meet. (although american intelectual average seems to be much lower than that for most of europe, sadly, and gushed with a hefty dose of ignorance…) Mind you most of American students that come over here for exchange, come across as positively naive about the world. I’d almost say – sweet.
Just to clarify – I am quite fond of the US, and love to live in California or Florida (never mind the policing restictions…)
and @ previous commentators – with regard to US of A providing rest of the world with oh so many inventions and techs – please check surnames and countries of origin of most of the scientists/developers (bet most of them are Jewish/Russian/East European,German or Japanese) – it’s money that talks and USA is still one of the best environments to do research/devel.
BTW @olipollod – I thought that web was developed in France (or Belgium) and then scrapped, even prior DARPA doing any serious devel on hypertext. Or am I wrong?
I did that on the switch from .NET 1.1 to .NET 2.0.
I got infected and since I prefer open/free platform over Windows based platforms.
As a previous .net developer I felt as a tourist when visited the wonderful world of open/free software. Ever since, whenever I come across ex-Microsoft developer I try to ease the process for him/her as much as I can.
i bet there are .net developers who can kick some pretentious python/whatever programmers arse (including me, who does c exclusively).
arent we old enough for “my language is better than yours”?
@joe:
Shocking that you prove the point of this article. The telephone was invented by a British citizen while living in Canada.
Similarly, the television wasn’t invented in the US either.
Neither was basketball. OMG! Get over yourself.
Hah, again “most tv shows” comment. Where I live, (sadly) most are Brazillian, there are plenty of local ones and some British pearls.
Very much a generalization …
You should differ.
- Microsoft is the company that is very much disliked here in the first case. Compare this to google, google is accepted much more everywhere compared to Microsoft.
- As for politics, it is viewed that your politicans are very corrupt and militaristic. US society has been brainwashed to accept military as central aspect of their life. There is more than one way to view something, but this is also rather separate from the typical “US programmer”
Now to the question about .net
I am not entirely sure what .net makes so radically new. It just seems like an improved java… you still have to go to huge lengths while creating repetitious boilerplate code.
The “smart” people are that
- find solutions
- with as few lines of code as needed
- have this elegant
etc.. etc..
It doesnt matter if they are in the .NET world or outside, but for now the the .NET world needs to persuade the non-Microsoft world that it is actually able to do something better.
You see we all need to strive for new ideas, and companies tend to keep good ideas away if it cannibalizes on their income. See SUN as an example and how long it took them to open Java …
I am in the same boat, I have been doing .NET for the past few years, but I recently switched all of my home computers over to Linux (with a VM for MS dev), and have been diving into the wonderful world of Python these last few weeks. I’m mostly trying to gain a little perspective, but it’s also nice to have another tool under my belt to use when needed.
I will be watching your blog with interest to see how things work out for you.
Thanks
Mark
First I disagree with your premise. I’ve had 2 businesses in 2 different foreign countries as well as simply working in 2 others. The “dislike” is always espoused by a certain type of author/journalist and intellectual. The average joe in all the countries (more than those 4) I’ve been to really do like Americans and the U.S. That said … I’ve often been in a group of non-Americans and run into groups of Americans who invariable make themselves known by their very loud behavior. Yet I’ll never forget the Brit who found me and a fellow American in North Thailand with a group of Thais and he said finally he found some blokes doing things. Americans do have an often naive confidence which leads them to do things people from other cultures would not.
I do agree about the disdain for those using MS technologies. I personally use and appreciate MS although I also use unix/linux and much prefer it. Have you ever seen someone from unix culture use a computer compared to someone from the MS culture? I have and it’s not pretty. Invariably the MS citizen uses his mouse for the most basic operation and most would actually use notepad, wordpad or even word to view and edit files even though much better and free tools exist even for windows. Succinctly I’d say MS citizens on average have a much lower computer IQ and much less imgaination that citizens of unix/linux.
I have to disagree with you,
Anti Microsoft is more like anti american than anything else, many people judge Microsoft based on its name than on the quality of there product. same like people who are did not read enough about America. there is always a ligitimate critisism spot for both.
that is said, I think the words that most people hate American is words from the mouth of politicians who only want to scare the public and make them vote there own way. Many people disagree with some aspect of American policies, but that dose not mean that other people dont like Americans.
Your analogy only partially works because while it’s true .net developers and Americans are hated in their respective communities, you don’t have a choice if you are born in America but *choosing* the .net platform is your own pathetic fault and just shows those that choose .net have no personal integrity or even care about the future of the industry as a whole.
Very well put, sir. Personally I take opinions on technical matters much more seriously from people who are somewhat well rounded in their world view, whatever their current affiliation may be.
Let me start with a little ad hominem – you are an idiot…
You are making sweeping generalities based on little empirical evidence.
In regard to non-U.S. based feelings toward Americans: even the uneducated peasants of Nicaragua are sophisticated enough to recognize the separation of the U.S. citizenry from its government. There is strong disdain and hatred of the our government and its policies (rightfully so, I might add), but feelings for an individual U.S. citizen are mostly dependent on that person’s attitude and behavior.
In regard to .NET developers: The skill levels of any subset of developers will widely vary. Languages, platforms, and toolkits can be thought of construction tools (hammers, saws, bulldozers, etc.). The topic of your discussion points to your general naivete about software development and building construction. You are saying something akin to – if you use a makita powersaw versus a dewault powersaw, you must be less competent… There are plenty of idiots who use .NET and there are plenty of idiots who use LAMP. Likewise, there are plenty of excellent developers who use .NET and plenty of excellent developers who use LAMP.
Another point about your ignorance… There is a notion in software development called – abstraction. This principal has many corollaries, one of which is that it is good to black box things so that the consumer of an object/service doesn’t need to know a whole lot about the object/service in order to use it. Microsoft has done an excellent job of black boxing their sdk so that the developer doesn’t need to know a whole lot about the internal workings to get started. A developer who does know the innards of how .NET works will likely write better code, but one who doesn’t can still do a decent job. A new developer who tries to use LAMP will be frustrated by the disparate products they have to deal with to just get set-up. LAMP requires considerably more ramp-up time. .NET is a great way for newbs to get there feet wet and start learning how to write software.
And finally… software developers can use the principals of software design in LAMP or .NET. Anyone who is minimally adept at coding recognizes that the tools do not determine the quality of the builder.
Useful to consider the two types of US tourist — one, the loud brash imbecile, and the other the receptive, polite sightseer. When someone *notices* an “American tourist”, it’s because they’re bellowing “Look, dear! Lie-chester Square!” on the tube, or talking slowly and condescendingly to foreigners. It’s the fact that this guy is loud and stupid that makes him visible.
What I think people probably see from the .Net side is the equivalent; developers with one language under their belt, without a decent educational background, wwithout exposure to other technologies and therefore unable to compare.
On the other hand, do those great C# and VB programmers get much credit? When the C# language team members gush about continuations and monads and immutable B-trees, does anyone recognise the fact that C# seems to be able to handle these things nicely? What about Simon Peyton-jones, who’s been developing the glasgow haskell compiler on Microsoft money, and whose work has clearly and massively influenced C# and the .Net framework. Or Anders Hejlsberg’s achievements with the Linq architecture?
Also, the worlds are probably not as polar as people assume. Microsoft has compilers for python, ruby, c , haskell and ocaml (F#). The only decent compiler they’re missing is lisp. But then, who isn’t?
“Anyone who is minimally adept at coding recognizes that the tools do not determine the quality of the builder.”
Of course they do. Not determine precisely, but they do say something about you. For one thing. more sophisticated tools require a deeper understanding of the issue and thus users of those tools (if they know how to use them) are bound to be more sophisticated in the field. Secondly, if you’re writing your desktop applications in assembler you may be a very good coder, but most people will think there’s something wrong with you, because a sensible developer would use more powerful/efficient tools.
“Ruby, Rails, Python, Django, and MySQL in the near future”
What, no PHP anywhere? If you’re going travelling, I’d highly recommend a stop at this classic (and, thanks to frameworks like CakePHP and Symfony), still relevant part of the programming world.
Hi, I work currently as a .NET developer. I have also been on the other side of the “fence”, and I have to say that .NET/MS citizens are actually less skilled compared to *nix/mobile/embedded fellows. I have no numbers or anything to back up that claim, it’s just a gut feeling.
Why I feel like this? MS platform is all about narrowing choices (and there is rarely open discussion/research about anything), at least that’s how it is at corporate world. *nix world on the other hand is all about the choices and open discussion and research. And the implementations are usually open sourced. MS developers/companies seem to have this strange attitude that if it’s not from MS it’s not worth to investigate. The same thing goes with all those fancy administration GUIs that you have on Windows platform. You can master the GUIs even if you don’t understand anything thats going around beneath.
Who the hell claims they’re from the US and then uses “arse”. I call BS.
It’s like you just woke up. MS sucks THE BIG WAY. But millions of stupid people like it for its primitiveness. So now you have to follow whatever MS says… unless you are not in MS camp
BTW, .NET is just a joke. As someone said, it is a way (not great) for newbies to start learning how to write software. I would say go with Turbo Pascal for a start and then keep away from MS as long as possible.
A little traveling is dangerous. As a C#/Asp.net developer since 2001, I decided to do a couple projects in Rails last year and now have switched to it fulltime.
Visiting PHP is like visiting Sub-Saharan Africa. Really makes you appreciate what you have.
eh, been there done that. I’ll stick with Microsoft technologies please. A) Most companies pay a good percentage more for .net technologies and as a contractor, i’ve never had problems finding a new client. There’s that pressure to just make sure I can put food on the table. B) My career path followed the many perl/python/java *nux varieties and I said enough, and went on to windows. I even gave Rails a try when the kool-aid was the strongest. What I notices is failed patterns everywhere, when I was using perl, there were security holes in PM’s everywhere. EJB’s are terrible and terrible for programming. Rails, well, it’s cute, there are so many fundamental pieces missing from the language to truly be productive. I’d say it’s still 2 years out.
BTW: Fortran, LISP has been popular longer, and it doesn’t mean it’s a good language.
No one ever got fired for choosing Microsoft.
I relate it to the Ivy league syndrome….
You have two resumes in front of you. One’s for a guy who graduated from Harvard, and one’s from a guy who graduated from Nowhere U.
The NU guy has the stronger resume and interviewed better. But if you champion him to the boss, give him the job, and he fails, it will be your fault for picking a guy from NU.
Pick the guy from Harvard however, and you can fall back on “Sheesh Boss, I figured he could do the job. He graduated from Harvard ferchrissakes!”
Viola. Not your fault anymore.
@Matt
Following the form, here’s the ad hominem: “You’re clearly a misinformed isolationist with the reading comprehension of a 10 year old. And not the smart kind either”.
The post was clearly generalising about both Americans abroad and the .NET language. Generalisations that I believe hold up quite well but as with all generalisations will have exceptions.
To your point about the “uneducated peasants of Nicaragua”, you’ve just generalised yourself. On top of that, I’ll show you a great many cultures that sadly do not distinguish between actions of the American government and those of its people. Not that that was even the point of the discussion. What the post was talking about was that many Americans are ill informed about the rest of the world. I’ll provide citations if you’d like.
As to your next point, again you’ve got it completely mixed up. Is this a case of “methinks the lady doth protest too much”? Nowhere is it implied that .NET developers are idiots, merely that they can be isolationist. If, on the other hand you are a .NET developer, we have clear evidence that at least one .NET developer is an idiot.
Your next point about abstraction is so irrelevant to the discussion it’s almost not worth discecting it. Yes abstraction exists, yes .NET may be less intimidating to some as an entry point to programming than LAMP. What is your point? How does this speak to .NET developers being isolationist? I’m tempted to ask you not to respond just because I don’t think you’ll be capable of reading through this comment and providing related responses.
And on to your final point. Again, yup, tools do not the developer make. The sky is blue. I like cheese. What on earth is your point?
Matt, your insecurity is evident. Is it because you don’t understand technologies outside of Microsoft? Is it deeper than that? How can we, the nebulous internet community, provide some support for you. Your post is clearly a cry for help.
.NET really isn’t all that new. It’s based on Delphi, which has been around since 1995, and created by some of the original Delphi architects who left Borland to join Microsoft.
Summarised from Wikipedia:
The original chief architect behind Delphi, Anders Hejlsberg, moved to Microsoft in 1996, and was a key participant in the creation of the Microsoft .NET Framework, becoming the chief designer of C#. Chuck Jazdzewski, who was chief scientist and architect of Delphi left Borland and joined Microsoft in 2004.
Don’t waste your time trying to please trolls on reddit. Instead, follow your “geek conscience” and investigate these other things for the pure love of it instead.
And, yes, you’re missing out if you haven’t tried Python. Simple as that.
If you categorize yourself as a “.NET developer” or a “JAVA” developer then you are starting out in the negative. We don’t have a ton of languages because they each perform well in all areas, it is like saying you prefer the hammer over a screwdriver, they are totally different!
I think you shouldn’t divide the language world in “MS languages” and “the rest”. Thats totally unnecessary. I am a computer science student, i know a whole lot of languages. I choose the language depending on the project i want to do. And i like C# for windows. Why should i try fitting a project to windows if i can do it the easy way?
Real programmers and developers should be language independent i think.
The point with american tourists is btw. true. You can spot them miles away. Loud and mostly uncivilized. As if everyone should obey their manly power.
Best wishes & good luck for your travels!
Just remember that everybody does the same thing differently! And don’t forget to upload pictures of yourself at exotic locations.
@Fletch
re: Uneducated peasants in Nicaragua
I was a peace corp volunteer in Nicaragua and worked with them for over two years. I was amazed at how they were not angry about what Ronald Reagan did to them. I traveled throughout Central America (and Africa and Europe) and my experience has been that almost everyone I’ve met understood the distinction between a people and their government.
re: ill informed about the world…
Lots of people are ill informed about alot of things. There are plenty of LAMP developers who know nothing about .NET just as there are plenty of .NET developers who know nothing about LAMP. The point is that it is stupid to cry foul on the .NET people. I’d like to see someone who uses Eclipse use VS 2005/2008 and make a comparison. The VS suite is orders of magnitude better than anything LAMP has.
re: no where is it implied…
“In other words, I believe that the prevailing stereotype about .NET developers is that we wouldn’t know a software best practice or sound computer science principle if it recursively bit us in the arse.” My reading comprehension is at least that of a 13 year old…
re: abstraction is irrelevant…
see the above comment that was made in the original article.
re: my point
I happen to be working with .NET right now. There are a lot of great things about it and there are some things I find flawed. I had the same experience with LAMP (I actually taught OOAD). I had the same experience with COBOL/MF. I had the same experience with lots of different tools. The point is that as developers we should be focus on learning design patterns and principals and whatever we happen to implement them in doesn’t matter. If the business requirements ask you to use .NET/LAMP/COBOL/whatever, you should be flexible and be adept at whatever you need to be.
re: ad homimen
So… I’m a mid 30s, self taught developer who has a hot wife, beautiful children, and am a self-made millionaire. You really couldn’t say anything to hurt my feelings… btw – You’re mother is a fat, ugly ho who is sorely disappointed in her offspring…
re: Microsoft
Lots of people hate Microsoft. Some of their products suck (Vista), some of their products are great (Visual Studio). I personally choose to purchase Microsoft products whenever there is a reasonable choice because I admire the work of the Gates Foundation. Larry Ellison buys jet fighters with his money; I’m not sure what the *NIX millionaires (if there are any) do with their wealth – prolly try to get girlfriends…; but Bill Gates has personally improved the lives of millions of people with his Microsoft riches. So, I will support MSFT when it’s possible.
re: cry for help…
I provide consulting services and am booked solid for an indefinite period of time. I will be hiring .NET developers in the following weeks to help with my services and product offerings. My cry for help is that I be able to take a vacation this year because demand for my services is too high…
re: the stupidity of your argument about isolationism…
Yeah – that’s why when people hire builders to construct their homes, they ask to ensure that the laborers know how to use the home depot screw driver, the lowes screw driver, the ace hardware screw driver, and the craftsmen screw driver. Just the other day, I heard a contractor lost business because his people didn’t know how to use the Makita power drill – they only knew how to use the Dewault… You are right, just because someone is good at .NET development and is making a good living from it and is quite competent at software design, they should spend their free time learning 15 minutes of popularity technologies like python, ruby, php, lisp, etc. because the people who know that stuff are so cool… I’m sure all the paying customers care so much that you use lisp to develop their products and services. I’m sure we will read the article in businessweek that the corporate decision makers and end use customers have decided that everything must be done with ruby on rails from now on… I’ll have to eat my humble pie then for not taking the advice of the ruby on rails advocates… Or will it be lisp…
agreed
when there’s a equivalente linux IDE for C , as free as VC Express, i’ll switch to linux
Great article, I couldn’t agree more with both your description of how American tourists can be percieved (I’m from the UK) and .NET developers.
I’m an avid Linux user and developer, but I’ve recently joined a company that is very Microsoft focused. I find it really hard to understand why they use inferior MS products such as source safe when there are technically superior products available for free, such as SVN.
I wish you luck on your journey, and I’m sure you’ll LOVE python!
tl;dr
Great analogy. MSFT-bubble programmers are like tourists who only want to go to AmericaTown Burger Joint when there is healthier, cheaper, and more exciting food at the local eateries.
Well as one of those Ruby\Python\Mysql types I am going to be taking the opposite approach and checking out some .NET tech a bit more deeply.
I’ll trade you passports
to joe
“Most people in the world may not like us, but whether they want to admit it or not they are better off because of us. Each time they turn on the TV or a personal computer, surf the net, talk on a telephone, drive a car, fly in an airplane it is a tacit endorsement of American culture.”
thats true but, most of all those things are done by people from that other countries and leave in america.
I can agree with everything if I make just one tiny replacement : your_text.replace(’.NET’, ‘Java’)
Ryby, Python – OK.
Why Java???
Java is worse than C# (It’s not so bad. It’s just like C# 0.8)
JVM is worse than .NET (Ever tried to compare speed of Jython vs IronPython?)
When I read interviews with Gosling I do not know what I must do : cry or laugh or seek my AK.
Everything in Java is to make simple things complicated.
“We do not plan to add this feature, because MS added this feature. Even if it makes life easier it’s wrong to copy MS’
The usual generalizations of the uninformed. Having traveled a fair bit of Europe and having several traveling friends, one thing we have all found is how misinformed the “everyone hates Americans” comment is. Typically the negatives standout in most anything – and know one doubts there are “bad” tourists from this country. Nor any other for that matter. Of course the news about the US in foreign countries tends to use half-truths and a definite bias in its reporting.
As for MS vs not MS tools – use the right tool for the job. Anything past that is based on emotion, not intellect.
There’s no arrogance quite like programmer arrogance. Suggesting that a .net developer is lesser than a developer of any other language is as unfounded as suggesting every American is as stupid as our current President.
There are advantages and disadvantages to many different development environments. The nice thing about .net is you don’t need to have 10 years experience as a Unix admin just to get your code to compile.
The Ruby/Python people need to get off their soap box. You aren’t a better person for coding in Ruby any more than a German is better than an American for speaking German. All it really means is your code will take more effort to run on a Windows machine which, like it or not, is still the OS of choice for most of the world.
The nice thing about .net is you don’t need to have 10 years experience as a Unix admin just to get your code to compile.
No, you just have to remember which 10-level deep graphical sub-menu the relevant option is on, and spend 15 minutes hunting through them with your mouse, rather than a grep and a text edit in a flat config file.
(Really, any developer who can’t command-line compile their own code does not have enough experience.)
All it really means is your code will take more effort to run on a Windows machine which, like it or not, is still the OS of choice for most of the world.
Never been a problem for me, with GNU toolchain, cross-platform comes for free.
Um p…
Lots of us .NET people don’t use the GUI wizards… Also, there is a config file and an easy way to access it in .NET.
I’m not sure if you’ve ever used VS, but the autocomplete and debugging on it are amazing.
re: compiler…
Yeah – there is a geekier dork out there who says anyone who can’t write their own compiler doesn’t have enough experience…
If you understood object-oriented theories, you’d get the point that black boxing things can be very nice…. In this case, clicking a button that says build/compile is nicer than opening up a command prompt, figuring out your package directory structure, figuring out your compiler options, etc… It gives .NET developers more time to eat donuts – that’s why we’re fatter…
Please give the .NET guys a break – not all of us can grow pony tails and memorize comic book series and recite all the episodes of the simpsons… we’re too busy making money…
Oh that’s just too bad.
Americans are a really nice guy. Eats burger and fights terrorists all the time.
My two cents, although I think you’ve hit the nail pretty much head on.
The issue that most people resent about american is exemplified clearly in the first post of this blog. And that is the fact that (lay-) Americans generally get most, if not all, their information through propaganda and rarely through personal research. The fact that said “Joe” thinks all those things are American is nothing more than a propagation of the “spreading democracy and freedom” standard that has been erected at the spear-tip of the empire.
Now all politics aside, I think this is exactly the case with Microsoft developers. The word propaganda may have fallen out of usage back in the WWII era because it was being used by the Germans – but there was a new term coined to replace it: Public Relations.
Now think about it, how much information about Microsoft comes through PR, and how much of it comes through *real* word of mouth and real world experience. And conversely, how much information about debian’s apt-get comes through PR and how much of it comes through real world experience.
I myself have coded mostly on Windows platform throughout my career, but have done so as a mercenary: ie because I was paid to do so. But I’ll tell you this, there’s nothing that irks me more than some guy I have to work with (at any level), that just hashes out something can/can’t be done when I know their only source of information is MS PR.
This was especially true when .NET first came to be, and it was touted by anyone in upper management as the solution to every problem ever conceivable by the human race. Right up there along with XML. A PR dream come true.
Same reasoning goes for New York City btw. People hate NY for the same cluster of reasons they hate MS and hate the US. NY is both dominant and insular, like MS and like the US.
Hi, all code is the same, different syntax, different purposes. Shut the fuck up already. You nerdy bitches.
Someone up there was way off base. Basketball was invented in the United States (admittedly by a Canadian).
[...] post is making the rounds: Are .NET developers the American tourists of the software industry? Some random [...]
Strange attitude about MS. It’s difficult to see why people are so down; there’s a strange disconnect between the way people judge MS products vs the way they judge non-MS tools. A bug in the .Net framework gets a lot more stick than one in the Matz Ruby Interpreter.
The MS world is pretty damn flexible, and technically very competent; it’s easy to put together a lot of different software easily, the languages are interoperable, and it’s all just *there* and ready to use.
First, people around the world learn English as their second language. It in their best interest to know English. As an American, what language should I learn? I know Spanish, so should I only vacation in Spanish speaking countries? Truth be told, if there was ONE other language that was predominantly spoken throughout the world, I would learn it.
Second, people around the world learn about the US. Its a facination. Its a necessity. If I go to Argentina, they may know all sorts of things about the USA. But I bet you they know just as little about Luxembourg, Estonia, or Mali as any American. People learn about the US because its policies affect the world.
Third, Americans learn world history, but in the long run, tell me one thing that Nambaryn Enkhbayar, president of Mongolia, or King Carl of Sweden has done to effect the world in the same manner of George Bush, Bill Clinton, or even Jimmy Carter? The American foriegn policy, good or bad, changes the world. Many foriegners know who is running for president in 2008. Can they tell me who is the President of Mexico? or Peru?
Now for .NET, C# is about the 15th language or so I have learned over the last 25 years of writting code. It is the easiest one for me to rapidly develop any type of application. I have written web apps, windows apps, windows services, mobile apps, and Lego Mind Storm apps. Windows is everywhere, as a result .NET is everywhere.
If my dad calls me and asks me to write a little program to manage his NRA database, I can do it. If my mom calls and asks for a program to parse HL7 2.4 messages for her EHR system, I can do it. My brother’s rock band needs to update their web site, I can do it. I need to auto-publish 1000 PDF legal documents out to a website, no problem. If I need to create an app to resize/rename pictures and publish them to my wife’s web site, I can do that. Employers can hire me to write custom solutions to pretty much any problem and they pay me well. I can do it all with one technology, one language. Why learn something else?
Steve Cooper:
I think you’re a bit biased. When sony installed a rootkit it got skewered… Sun’s keeping of Java non open, IBM’s mere existence, Diebold’s stuff… even Apple has a bunch of bad rep (for example with DTrace) – the only thing holding it back from the feeding fenzy being the low number of users…
Microsoft is held to the same standard, if not lower (think IE).
Your last paragraph btw, is the reason this blog post exists. What you label as being “all just there” has been just there for 3 decades in unix. Seriously. Get a clue. I’m not denying Microsoft has done good things for research, but holy batman… what you think they’ve done, doesn’t even come close to what is actually available. You should for example check out OSX’s development environment. For free, it does pretty much all of what MSDEV studio does, and then throws in bonus (industrial grade) material like DTrace and “Shark”… I remember dishing out 3k license fees for Boundschecker…
And, no. They’re not interoperable. C for Microsoft compilers is highly proprietary. I doubt it would even compile on gcc…
Sigh. I’m wasting my breath. What I meant to say was: you are fractaly wrong.
>Most people in the world may not like us, but whether they want to admit it or not they are better off because of us. Each time they turn on the TV or a personal computer, surf the net, talk on a telephone, drive a car, fly in an airplane it is a tacit endorsement of American culture.
Wow. You were the guys that invented airplanes? Cars? Telephones?
Wow. Newsflash: the US invented none of those things.
So, our culture integrates ideas from America, sure; i’ll give you that. We eat hamburgers. You eat pizza’s. Its called an exchange of ideas.
It is however _stereotypical_ that an american would confuse globalization with ‘the world is becoming more like America’.
You are definately a worthy troll.
Now about .NET
I am a developper, but I develop for an IT job agency. So i’m supposed to keep up and experiment with a lot of technology.
.NET is really not that bad. It has much less design mistakes from its epoch than Java. Then again, they were pretty on par at any given date, with the edge of elegence in the favor of .NET
Nevertheless, it is not hackable; much like Java. Which means it scales badly if you want to depend on existing tools or infrastructures. The thing about .NET is that its a platform that expects windows, which makes it pretty useless by default.
Mono solves some of these problems, still doesn’t really provide the native integration into linux you would hope for. For 80% of all purposes .NET would do fine and i have no doubt you can work around the other 20% by just developping more yourself or throwing more money at the hardware. Nevertheless its going to be hard to built say a youtube competitor on MS’ software stack, or something like gmail. It really is not so much a restriction of .NET itself, as well as a default restriction on any self-contained framework. But defaulting it to Windows makes matters much worse.
Off course none of this makes .NET an ugly or bad framework. It still is elegantly designed. It is the ´closed’ environment and contained ‘framework’ that makes it a bad fit for the real world, where it’s just much faster and much more scalable to use a hybrid selection of tools, that can be ported to any hardware platform, and can be glued together by (shell) scripting languages.
Off course for the small companies, that just develop databases and front-ends, who cares? They should be choosing frameworks based on time * salary. In which case .NET developpers are as cheap as you can get them, right after Java. It’s also well suited for medicocre programmers, something the non-enterprise setups do not take into account (with PHP being the big exception).
New subscriber here!
I think Microsoft seduced a certain segment (read, “I only know to drag and drop and I want to do this programming thingy”) fifteen years ago and is now trying to play catch up with the “wise folks”, but always fearing losing its loyal base of not-so-bright developers…
There are some cool things in .NET. But they are all either copies of others’ technologies (the VM per se, say), some really interesting mashups (the way the DLR integrates dynamic languages into the VM, much better than Sun’s efforts, for example), and a sparse few own additions (delegates is my favorite, adding a little closure-like functionality to a rigidly typed language). So, from Microsoft’s part, I see some smart engineering going on (most of them in labs not products).
Still, I don’t know if it’s the tools, the environment or the culture around it, but it keeps fostering new not-so-bright developers. It’s just that the devs seemingly aren’t smart enough (and some of them even lose some of their potential… I’ve seen it). Many even lose curiosity in technology (which is fatal in this industry).
So, I don’t really know what MS should be doing. On one hand, someone should focus on that segment… on the other, the world needs better coders and fast…
In the end, the blame lies in the one who doesn’t aim to perfect him/herself in what he/she makes for a living, and not in a vendor which just took and opportunity…
nachokb
@The Guy
Man… I’m sounding like a MSFT fanboy here when I’m really neutral and technology independent.
I’ve used all the *nix stuff. Grep sucks, vi sucks, php sucks. To those that claim it works for them, great. I hope they are happy. I’m sure they use notepad instead of word and use their own custom spreadsheet software instead of excel. I’m sure they even read their news in binary…
I’ve supported millions of lines of COBOL, tens of thousands of lines of Java and have used all the tools you guys are talking about. I’ve earned about 60% of my money with non-Microsoft technologies and about 30% with Microsoft technologies. Microsoft is a great copier of good things. They notice the cool stuff that esoteric small companies build and then they either buy that company if they are really good, or they steal the technology and implement in their own products. But you know what… all good companies look at what their competitors do and try to emulate the good parts.
Getting setup and maintaining a LAMP development environment can be a nightmare. You are looking at 8-20 different product lines from different organizations that have different levels of compatibility with eachother. I love MySQL – i used to use them quite a bit, until MSFT noticed that they needed to keep marketshare by implementing their own free version of SQL Server. BTW – SQL Server Express is FREE and orders of magnitude easier to maintain than MySQL. I have a production app that used to be hooked up to MySQL, but migrated to SQL Server Express and it runs 120% faster on SQL Server Express (the migration was seamless and painless because I used DAO Factories and used MVC architecture in C#) I’m sure if I spent time learning how to be a MySQL guru, I could have tuned it to the same level if not better, but the point is, I don’t want to spend that time. I’d rather get it out of the box.
Anyone who talks about the usefulness Java platform independence has never actually done it… While this notion is theoretically possible, I’ve never heard of or experienced a seemless transition of a significant application from one platform to another. All software is proprietary… Just look at how MySQL is now a bunch of money grubbing fools with their licensing and ‘enterprise’ versions…
To whomever wrote the original article – please honestly post the amount of time and effort required to setup a simple gridview type page without using MSFT.
From personal experience, it took me 2 and a half days to learn and setup a simple Java web service. It took about 2 hours to learn and implement a more complex web service using VS 2003…
Also from personal experience, languages like python and lisp are much more elegant than C# and much much more elegant than VB. I’d even agree that they are technically superior to the MSFT languages. But in the end C# and ASP.NET are my tools of choice to tackle just about anything because of the libraries I’ve built for them, the ease of implementing solutions, and the amount of support and materials available about them.
Italian is a much more beautiful language than English, Swiss-German is probably a much more concise language than English, but I’ll stick to using English in my day to day life…
Utterly ridiculous. There is a group of people that avoid Microsoft tools simply because they’re Microsoft tools. These people have been very good at spreading propaganda that they’re somehow better programmers and you’re buying into this nonsense.
Some of us choose tools based on rational and not emotive reasons. Used properly, .Net provides a comprehensive, productive and elegent foundation for building applications. This drag and drop crap has never been used by good programmers in substantial applications.
Many of the languages and frameworks used by the anti-microsoft crowd are horribly bodged together hackjobs that religously avoid best practices.
In my experience there are plenty of programmers on either side of the fence can’t code to save themselves, and produce unmaintainable crap. However, one group is arguably inexperienced, the other is willfully stupid and delusional.
>Used properly, .Net provides a comprehensive, productive and elegent foundation for building applications
That was exactly what i called it: ELEGANT.
>Many of the languages and frameworks used by the anti-microsoft crowd are horribly bodged together hackjobs that religously avoid best practices.
But they get jobs done quickly that are simply impossible with any of the frameworks(Java or .NET)
Also, it really is just a matter of perspective. You think of .net as a platform that has a specific version (that relates to the version of its libraries). Those ‘hackjobs’ think of unix as the platform and a distrobution as a specific version (that relates to the version of its tools and libraries).
Also, the majority of these tools only break api on new major versions. However, installing different major versions of say MyS
Old VB6 developers are the problem with .NET, not the tools.
Microsoft has solid tools with no integration troubles, compared to any current or past Java-based stack.
For example, debugging ASP.Net in IIS has been relatively painless from day one.
The problem is that there still are hordes of 40 year old VB6 programmers with no intention to do anything else but write their crappy VB6-style programs again and again with ASP.Net. And these people are likely to be your bosses in the MS world! I mean, you can’t trust anything until you see the code.
You can write FORTRAN with any language, and that goes with .NET too.
..
Also, the majority of these tools only break api on new major versions. However, installing different major versions of say MySQL side by side is _not_ a problem at all.
Par example:
sudo aptitude install mysql-5
sudo aptitude install mysql-4
The point is: Microsoft sells great cars and great trucks. But linux allows you to replace the tiers, open up the hood of the car and replace the engine, change the oil, etc.
If all i ever need is a car, than microsoft-ecosystem will serve me much better. Faster, hell even cheaper. (esspecially since its easier to maintain and use => lower pay-grade)
If I need a caravan however, Microsoft is simply not supplying me; but I can built one using linux parts is a small amount of time. Is that a hackjob? Well, that totally depends on your discipline .. how well do you document what you do, how well do think it through?
That is why everything from YouTube to NASA, to Google to DoD runs on linux. That is why all ISP’s run on linux. Why all the majority of the infrastructure of the internet runs on linux.
Because they can start building it _now_. They don’t have to wait until Microsoft sells a prefab setup.
Seriously, LAMP vs .NET for a simple website, .NET has an edge. But there is a reason why so many complicated things run on linux. It’s the only way to setup it up. Microsoft isn’t even trying to compete in these markets.
And I am the first one to admit, that the unix side of things lack the simplicity or the ‘elegance’ of these contained frameworks and controlled eco-systems. .NET is much more fool-proof.
But when your not a fool, that really doesn’t give it any edge. It just means less freedom, more restrictions, more dependence on some vendor.
Also, i would like to point out, that this is not MS-bashing. MS really is only a big player on the consumer side of things. On the average desktop.
They are not the major platform for serious enterprise development. I’m sorry. I wish it was, nothing wrong with some good competition. And as said before: the tend to steal the good ideas and integrate it nicely.
But they need to start with a real shell and some real shell access to system configuration and maintaince.
.NET is like lego. Any one can built a house with lego. It’s really cheap as well! But you can’t built ANY house with lego; only lego-houses. You can’t install a fireplace until microsoft develops fire-proof lego-blocks.
All of these .net evangalists seem to assume that the majority of development is what they do. But it’s not. And what you guys are using .NET for, its is problely perfect for that!
But there is so much more.. can we port a .net app to a low-energy low-cpu piece of hardware? Is it even supported on any non-i368 family of chips? Can i use a real filesystem with real user-management and hard-links and soft-links? Can I plug a virtual distribution networking file-system in between? Can i setup a simple replication of data-sources? Can I easily convert say a movie to a flash-file? Can I easily create a thumbnail of a movie? Can I influence the scheduler?
All the restriction lead to elegance, but they are still restrictions. It’s great that we
tools that mediocre programmers can _also_ use (not claiming that all or even the majority of .net programmeers are mediocre!). If I were to outsource development I would problely use Java or .NET as well. Because they allow for much less abuse and bad behavior. That’s a FEATURE.
But that’s also where the disdain comes from I think.
> What you label as being “all just there” has been just there for 3 decades in unix.
I’m not quite sure quite what you’re suggesting — what existed in 1978?
> I’m not denying Microsoft has done good things for research, but holy batman… what you think they’ve done, doesn’t even come close to what is actually available.
Happy to be proved wrong — what sort of things are we talking about?
> And, no. They’re not interoperable. C for Microsoft compilers is highly proprietary.
By this, I meant that the .net languages are interoperable with each other. It is possible to get one free IDE and to write a multi-tiered app with SQL backend, C support libraries, an OCAML business layer, a python web front end, and a C# forms front end, all within the same IDE and which share modules and classes. Throw in a debugger that’ll step all the way through the lot, a massive help system, built-in TDD, and intellisense, and you’ve got something pretty good, actually. It’s a bit slower than C, but it’s a lot faster than python. Meh.
> Seriously. Get a clue.
Offer a clue. What am I missing? I’m playing in C# daily using Haskell-style static type inference, ruby-style code block passing, lisp-style lambdas, ruby mixins. Programming this way feels pretty good, but maybe I really am missing features, and I’m interested to know what they are.
—-
> There are some cool things in .NET. But they are all either copies of others’ technologies (the VM per se, say)
The JVM is a fairly old concept, and predated by the Visual Basic p-code interpreter, which did roughly the same thing. Of course, p-code is a Pascal invention, but the point is, the JVM wasn’t the source.
>I’m playing in C# daily using Haskell-style static type inference, ruby-style code block passing, lisp-style lambdas, ruby mixins. Programming this way feels pretty good, but maybe I really am missing features, and I’m interested to know what they are.
From a language design point you are not missing anything.
But you are missing UNIX in your eco-system. Thats a big no no for me. I know about Mono, but the libraries are not designed for UNIX. Like Java it doesn’t really integrate well. Nut Java integrates _nowhere_. At least with .net you feel a first class citizen on windows. But windows is just too limiting for a lot of my development work.
Disregarding my hatred for the whole windows desktop interface and system configuration. I could develop on linux and just mount a windows-server or something. But how do I integrate the system with my application? Can i make a live-cd that just rolls out or boots my application? Is that even legal?
Where’s my terminal, where’s my virtual desktops, where is my expose, where is my cron, where is my bash, where is my apt, where is my bash completition, where is my native subversion, where is my native ssh, where is my x-forwarding) and they way they try to patch that by redo-ing what the desktop environment should have offered in the IDE. (which they do pretty well, but again not easily customizable)
> But you are missing UNIX in your eco-system.
We’re not discussing unix vs windows here — we’re discussing .net languages vs other languages like python, java, and ruby.
UNIX has it’s place, certainly. I don’t have a job in that place. I develop Windows desktop, server, and web software. The question is, can you convince me, with evidence, that there are better ways to develop these windows products?
I’m CTO of an start up. One of our hiring practices is to ignore any resumes that mention ASP or .NET.
Have you guys heard that Bill G is a fag???
> I’m CTO of an start up. One of our hiring practices is to ignore any resumes that mention ASP or .NET.
Can you explain why? And how is it working out for you?
gaaaa. people talk about their choice of languages like they’re talking about their wives.
i write code so i can pay my rent, feed my family, pay my student loans, &c.
i’ve written in (i’m having to think now, b/c it’s really not that important to me), C, MVS Assembler, ASM, C++, COBOL, EZT+, SAS, powerbuilder, the .nets, and VB5 and 6.
i don’t care what language i’m using, so long as the checks come, and at the end of the day, i can leave the office, and go do something i actually enjoy – be with my wife, go skating, play frisbee with the dog, read a book and eat snacks…
christ, get a grip. you’re telling little switches to turn on and off. you’re moving data around, and adding up numbers. you’re not changing the world, you’re not rescuing people from burning buildings. arguing about which language and its practitioners are more k-rad is like arguing about who’s better – ford mechanics or toyota mechanics.
get some perspective.
There’s good reason developers in other camps hate MS; it’s because MS promotes a mono, homogeneous culture. And by using .NET you promote it as well. If it’s not from MS, don’t use it. That’s the guidance MS perpetuates. Just look at their new MVC web framework. A little late to that party, eh? Castle already filled that void years ago, but MS, as they do with most .NET open-source efforts, chose to build their own. They could have just supported the efforts of the open-source community, but that’s not their MO.
So, after 4 years of .NET development, I quit. I’m sick of the bullshit. Why fight that culture when there are great tools available in other environments? Without ALL the MS bs.
I switched to Grails, the best damned MVC framework I’ve ever used, and I won’t be looking back. Good riddance.
Are .NET Developers the American Tourists of the Software Industry?…
You’ve been kicked (a good thing) – Trackback from DotNetKicks.com…
@Sebastian
A victim of the same ignorance you likely despise.
@Author
The irony of your ignorance in referring to us as “Americans” is killing me.
@Everyone Else
After living in both camps for many years, I’d say that Microsoft is a dangerous game because it’s an ecosystem of its own. When it comes to productivity, this could be described as living in a grocery store. Why go next door to get milk?
A computer scientist has a responsibility to uphold/earn the title “scientist” –which in my own words would be to regularly research, challenge and disrupt “authorities.”
It’s harder to get away with being passive in the open source world because the ecosystem is democratized and inherently dynamic. Microsoft on the other hand will present one, and only one solution, leaving the decision to challenge that solution up to you.
Obviously, being forced to look at many alternatives will in turn force a decision that is best *for you*.
But please be realistic. There are plenty of shitty open source projects to weed through, which can be frustrating. So, while the topic of this article is a very stimulating topic, it’s not fair to generalize without saying something to the effect of…
“.NET developers are tourists from the United States. Open source developers are the French.”
“Steady on there tiger! You wouldn’t want to rush in too soon.”
Take it easy and learn Boo, its a wrist friendly python inspired CLR language with metaprogramming.
@Karl, @Steve Cooper
Ignoring all ASP/.NET people helped us out get rid of nearly 50% – ` of unreliable candidates and about 80% of the offshore web development spam. We might be missing out the opportunity to hire that 1% percent that would be worth hiring that has ASP or .NET in their resumes but well.. we are all about efficiency and that’s a good price to pay.
>We’re not discussing unix vs windows here — we’re discussing .net languages vs other languages like python, java, and ruby
You can’t separate that discussion. Its like arguing wether a normal or a philips screwdriver is better. It really depends on the type of screws you want to screw.
I’ve already stated that .NET is an elegant, relatively speaking minimal, mix of language design features.
But it is a monolithic system. What it can’t do, it can’t do. And for a developpers tool, that’s simply not acceptable. I want open standards, neutral api’s, choice of IDE’s, etc. The integration of everything is as much a feature as its biggest downfall. The control Microsoft has over the api’s is a _problem_. The lack of freedom in IDE’s and source-control is a _problem_, the lack of a path of portability is a _problem.
>The question is, can you convince me, with evidence, that there are better ways to develop these windows products?
Well, no, on windows whatever microsoft is supplying by default is superior. Not because their choices are always superior, or because they have better programmers, but they can always ‘push’ their solution better, ‘integrate’ it better, etc. You wouldn’t get the same kind of integration with the system if was from any other vendor.
That’s the reason you don’t see any big vendors other than microsoft in the windows-ecosystem. Players like Adobe and Valve are reconsidering their loyalty in their mexican stand-off with microsoft. I have no doubt they have their linux versions ready, just in case. But they won’t deploy them because the obvious answer of Microsoft would be to compete with them. On the other hand if Microsoft choses to make the first move, they have no choice but to spread their wings. And microsoft is tipping its toe in the water. (Games for Windows, Silverlight)
Getting your company in that situation in the first place is bad management. Making really big bucks in the win-ecosystem is just dangerous. You are not competing on quality, you are competing on control of the users, but the house always wins.
Why do think companies like Nokia invest so much to bring linux to the mobiles?
That is why Microsoft’s ecosystem consists mostly of small players or big players in very specific areas.
So, irregardless of the fact that the technical limitations of windows as a platform and thereby .net there are also strategic reasons why .net is out of the question for a lot of companies.
And i’m not even touching the fact that it’s insane to write an app in a framework that makes porting pretty much impossible. Can you really predict the future demands _that_ well?
Always go with a language and libraries that at least offer some path of portability. It might take work, but can you really afford the risk? I don’t think any professional would.
When you start any project from scratch you try to maximilize freedom. The fewer dependencies on other companies, the better.
If your amazon and you need to create a virtual super-server, one that automatically clusters and distributes cpu, memory and storage. Linux did not offer it, but it offered enough to create it. With windows its just not possible until microsoft decides it is. And at that point, you are likely going to compete with them.
@Matt
“re: ill informed about the world…
Lots of people are ill informed about alot of things. There are plenty of LAMP developers who know nothing about .NET just as there are plenty of .NET developers who know nothing about LAMP. The point is that it is stupid to cry foul on the .NET people. I’d like to see someone who uses Eclipse use VS 2005/2008 and make a comparison. The VS suite is orders of magnitude better than anything LAMP has.”
I have used both Eclipse and MS 2005 (not 2008 though), and I have to say I hands down like Eclipse far more, and VS is definitely NOT orders of magnitude better. Eclipse has plenty of the same features VS does, such as auto complete, a nice debugger to breakpoint and view the stack and heap and view variable values and whatnot. Eclipse refactoring is just as good if not better (and I think came before VS adopted it).
The key things I like most about Eclipse that I have not seen in VS (maybe I don’t know the right option, or they added it to 2008), is automatic incremental building and organize imports.
With automatic incremental building, Eclipse builds my code with every change, so I always have a working set of .class files that I could run externally from Eclipse, or internally within Eclipse. The biggest benefit of this is that compile time errors are marked automatically as you are typing them. Yes VS does similar highlighting, but it is not based on full compilation, as there are some compiler errors (pretty much anything that is not simple syntactic errors) that will not show up until you build. For example, try creating a valid statement with an object type that is completely made up. You will not get a highlighted error until you build (at least in VS 2005).
Organize imports is the other feature I have not seen in VS that I really like in Eclipse (perhaps this exists, but I haven’t found it yet). One quick keystroke will import everything that needs to be imported, ask me for things that cannot be resolved automatically, AND organize the imports in a nice visual way (grouping similar packages together and enforcing a certain alphabetical sorting).
Sure VS can get the job done, but I would say Eclipse is just as rich if not more so than VS, and the final benefit that you just cannot compare to VS is that it is free. Why pay $100-$1000 for a product that I can get for free? Obviously this doesn’t hold if you absolutely must use a .NET language. But anyways, it comes down to preference, and my personal preference is Java Eclipse.
Furthermore, besides liking Java more than C# (despite using C# exclusively at work), I think they both pale compared to Ruby. I have been using Ruby for the last 3 months for personal, for fun, side projects, and I have to say the thrill of the language beats both hands down, no contest, not even in the same ballpark. There may not be as rich a toolset, but programming for the sake of enjoying programming… I will pick Ruby hands down over any other language I’ve tried (and I have Java, C, C , PHP, Haskell, C#, and Jython under my belt). Furthermore, with JRuby, I get a nice integration with my previous favorite language, and the richness of the Java API to fall back on, with the enjoyment of my new favorite language. Again, personal preference though.
As for the content of the original article, I salute you Russell. I think your article is dead on from my (albeit minimal) experience, and I wish you the best of luck in your excursion!
One thing that always bugged me about .net and visual basic developers is: why not just program directly in C to the platform sdk? Thats essentially how the bulk of GNU/Linux developers work. Just look at all the GPL free software out there. Warren Buffet talks about having a moat around your business and thats essentially what .net and visual basic represents to microsoft; by developing for these languages, you add to the proprietary microsoft moat protecting and surrounding their core platform sdk.
@Sebastian
Yeah – you’re a great CTO. Why don’t you have one of your techs grep the resumes with artifical intelligence to find your perfect matches. Hell, you and your people can probably write magic ware that just scans the resumes and finds people perfect for your organization. You wouldn’t even need to interview them.
Say, we’re going to be hiring people soon too. Do you think I can use your ingenius resume grepping ai to weed out women and minorities? Perhaps it could have a Blazing Saddles mode – “We’ll take the niggas and the chinks, but not the Irish…”
If you are going to make up a job title and role for yourself, can’t you do better than CTO of a startup? If by some small chance, you really are the CTO of a startup – can you let me know what startup so I can short it?
I just remember being in LA, and being asked where I was from (New Zealand). The American in question then went on to tell me how good my English language use was, and asked if I learned it at school. They were even more impressed when I told them that my parents had taught it to me since I was a baby.
(I didn’t have the heart to tell them that English is the primary language of New Zealand.)
@Mike
LOL – there is no way you have compiled even a moderately sized app in Eclipse. Eclipse can take upwards of 3-5 minutes to build a moderately sized app. Perhaps the incremental build “feature” was implemented to address this issue, but I imagine a full build would still be painfully slow.
Also – I say shenanigans on your claims about Eclipse being better at catching issues. First of all, builds take very little time in VS 2005 or 2008 – it is not a big deal to rebuild your app every 5 minutes since the build takes less than 20 seconds. Second, there is no way that a sdk can protect developers from all run time errors. You can just as easily Reflect invalid classes in Eclipse or in .NET and neither error would be apparent during a build.
There are free versions of visual studio and free versions of sql server (this shows you really don’t know much about the product lines). However, I’m happy to pay 1k, 2k, even 5k for the product. The price is small compared to the productivity I get. If you were a successful developer, 5k would be a neglible amount to pay for a decent sdk.
For all the people in love with the boutique languages – please look into the fate of smalltalk… A vastly superior language well ahead of its time… Now go look to see how many job reqs there are for knowing smalltalk syntax.
Message to all:
I’m glad my post sparked so much debate.
I obviously don’t scale well as a blogger since I am just now sitting down to read and try to respond to some of these comments.
Rather than trying to respond to everyone, I’ll probably compile my responses into a follow-up post.
Continue on,
Russell Ball (caffeinated coder)
Say NO to FAGS!
It’s not about the language. It’s about the user experience. The tool/language/scripting is rarely relevent.
[...] it for the comments: Are .NET Developers the American Tourists of the Software Industry? Also check out the Reddit comments. Article by Russell [...]
@Matt
Sent your resume we might give you a call if it does not include the words ASP or ASP.NET
We are based in Miami, FL but do offer a nice relocation assistance package.
http://miami.craigslist.org/eng/602312054.html
No AI skills needed.
[...] and blog posts show that prejudices exist on the web about programmers who use certain languages, or how a certain [...]
You’re a knob because you use backslashes instead of forward slashes.
> Ignoring all ASP/.NET people helped us out get rid of nearly 50% – ` of unreliable candidates and about 80% of the offshore web development spam.
Sounds relatively sensible, then, as a timesaver. Just sounded a little provocative in the context of the debate.
@Matt
Actually, I have compiled rather large applications in Eclipse, big fat enterprisy applications (I know, sad, but a job is a job, at least until I get a better job). I would argue it is no better, no worse, than Eclipse as far as compilation.
Which brings me to your next point… shenanigans eh? 20 seconds to build eh? Looks like YOU’VE never built a decent sized application in YOUR IDE of choice. That fat Java enterprisy app I mentioned? We have a C# client front end for it, and that client is just as fat and enterprisy… well maybe not quite so much so, but Visual Studio chokes on it just the same. The build takes no less than 10 minutes. Probably more like 15-20. I have a batch file to compile it from within visual studio command prompt (because it is comprised of about 4 solution files, each with a rather large amount of projects), and this still takes 10-15 minutes, even without the heavy Visual Studio GUI loaded. This isn’t on an ancient machine either, before you try to claim so.
Also, I was not trying to imply that Eclipse finds more bugs, I was merely pointing out the feature that Eclipse gives you quicker feedback for compile time errors. It is a simple feature, but it has proven effective to me. How can it hurt to show compile time errors as they are written? The organize imports is just as cool a feature too, and I noticed you didn’t comment on it so I will assume Visual Studio has no similar feature.
I had read there were free versions of Visual Studio, but I suspect they are rather gimped in some way to provide incentives to buy the full version. So again, why pay money when I can get a similar product for free? I work for a company, so I’m not the one buying the product, but at home for my own programming time… I will stick with the free tools that I perceive as better. And anyways, in a company… it’s not a 1-shot cost… you gotta think about licenses per employee, and upgrades in the future. For a small (20 person?) company, how much will that run you, even with discounts, for the full version? $15,000 if you are lucky? $20,000? How much does it have to be before a free and more or less equivalent tool starts to look more appetizing?
I would like to posit based on your comments that you haven’t touched Eclipse in a long time. How can you try to claim Visual Studio is orders of magnitude better than a product you clearly haven’t touched in so long? At best they are about equal in terms of functionality and power, though I would argue Eclipse has a SIGNIFICANTLY more rich plugin community than Visual Studio, due to its openness.
I think you have proved once more that you are exactly the kind of developer that Russel speaks of in this article. You seem to blindly adore the Microsoft products without really giving the others a chance, or perhaps you just have die hard preference for those tools… but I don’t think you should be trying to make false claims about their products compared to the competitors. I have used both Eclipse and Visual Studio (VS daily, and Eclipse whenever I work in Java in an extended period of time). My preference is Eclipse because of the features I mentioned before, but they are about equal in power, and I think anyone who really has tried both can’t argue more than “I like this feature more than what the other provides.” What ACTUAL features do you like about Visual Studio over Eclipse? All I have heard thus far is your false claims of productivity and imagined better performance. What causes an order of magnitude increase over Eclipse? Keep in mind order of magnitude is AT LEAST 10x improvement… which is a pretty damned big claim if you seriously believe it.
Ever read Frederick Brooks? The Mythical Man-Month? No Silver Bullet? Well, if there is a Silver Bullet, Visual Studio sure as hell isn’t it.
As for these “boutique languages,” I think it is safe to program in an language you want if it is for fun, which is why I pick the language I have the most fun in. I am not trying to make big bucks when I program for fun, just merely to pass the time with some interesting problems of my choosing. Why use a language that DOESN’T maximize my enjoyment? The goal is not a job. Though, I would like to make the guess that static typed languages like Java and C# will be replaced eventually, and the most likely next step is dynamic, powerful, high level languages like Ruby (notice LIKE Ruby, I am NOT trying to claim it WILL be Ruby). I have already read of C# starting to add dynamic features to version 3, though I haven’t looked into them… this is a start, but I doubt it is the end. Just look at the history of languages… machine code abstracted to assembly language, abstracted to higher level with control structures, abstracted by procedural languages to encapsulate functions, abstracted by objects to group functions with their data type, made easier with “managed code”… surely that’s not the end? It may not happen immediately, but I think the Next Big Thing will be when someone or some company takes a dynamic language with closures and other goodies to the masses.
@Sebastian
OK, perhaps you are legit. Also, if the product is already in RoR, and doesn’t require .NET at all, then I guess it might make sense to screen out certain things. I think you will find that screening to find things might be a better way of finding good developers. I’m not sure you can get anything more than a newb or college grad for 60-80K. Most of the specialists I hire go for $75 to $150 an hour depending on whether they are ui, app, or db. For permanent hires, we’ve budgeted 60-80k for our desktop support techs and 80-120k for our app developers. Also – I keep tabs on all the competent people I’ve worked with – it’s usually pretty easy to fill spots when you’re continually gauging people you work with who don’t realize they are being measured.
The original point I was trying to make is that the platform/tool someone has experience in is irrelevant. You could ask someone a few simple questions to figure out if they understand application development. Personally, I don’t care what tool they have experience in, the good developers understand OO and can implement it in any language or platform.
I’m not exactly sure what Russell’s intention was in writing this article. If he thinks that learning new languages is fun and he is doing it recreationally, that is fine and good. If he thinks that learning new languages will make him a better developer, he is mistaken…
If you’re a mediocre essayist in English, your essays will still be mediocre (or worse) if you learn to write in Spanish or French or Chinese…
@Mike
> I would like to make the guess that static typed languages like Java and C# will be replaced eventually, and the most likely next step is dynamic, powerful, high level languages like Ruby
I suspect static typing will remain popular, especially as features like static type inference come in. C#3 definitely has a ruby-like flavour now.
Compare this ruby code;
# filepaths of all files with the right extension
arr = Dir.
entries(folder).
select { |f| f[-3..-1] == extension }.
map { |f| folder “\\” f }
with the equivalent C# 3
// full filepaths of all files with the right extension
var arr = Directory.
GetFiles(folder).ToList().
FindAll ( f => f.EndsWith(extension) ).
ConvertAll( f => folder “\\” f);
(If that code got mangled, see it at http://www.stevecooper.org/doc.....eruby.txt)
I’m not claiming the code is the right way to solve a problem, only that the code samples look extremely similar. And the C# is typesafe, and runs at C#/java speed, not ruby speed. The pissing about declaring types is heavily reduced, but the benefits (compile-time type checking, intellisense, intelligent help, etc) remain.
> I have already read of C# starting to add dynamic features to version 3, though I haven’t looked into them.
Very much worth it. C# is now an amalgam of basically three approaches — a java-like base syntax, with haskell type inference, allowing ruby coding style. Pop over to http://www.dnrtv.com/archives.aspx and search for ‘ruby’ — you’ll find a couple of videos introducing ruby-like functionality to a c# audience. Basic stuff for a ruby programmer, but illustrative of what can be done.
@Matt
> If he thinks that learning new languages will make him a better developer, he is mistaken…
I think there is value to learning languages in different families. There’s not much value in learning Python after Ruby, or Java after C#. You’re not going to learn much.
OTOH, if you choose very different types of language (VM-and-OO vs. interpreted dynamic vs. lisps vs. pure functional vs. query language) you’ve got more concepts to help you break down problems. Decent scheme programmers do not blanch at recursion, haskell programmers at writing interpreters, C# programmers at developing GUIs, php programmers at making websites. Next time you need to put together a full-fat application, those concepts are all likely to occur. That’s the value in multiple language types.
Oh, why can’t we all just get along, and take the piss out of COBOL programmers?
@Mike
re: Compiling Eclipse vs VS
Java’s bytecode architecture has a fundamental disadvantage to .NET’s IL. Java is supposed to run anywhere… .NET knows where it is going to run. .NET compilation has a fundamental advantage in speed. Also – I’ve taken a snapshot of Eclipse from 3 years ago… And you would be liar in saying that compilation of comparable code is similar. Compilation alone makes VS an order of magnitude better than Eclipse.
” I have a batch file to compile it from within visual studio command prompt (because it is comprised of about 4 solution files, each with a rather large amount of projects), and this still takes 10-15 minutes, even without the heavy Visual Studio GUI loaded ”
re: Compiling 4 solutions with multiple projects…
Do you know what the point of a solution is? Do you know what the point of a project is? Why in the world would you have everything open at once? Learn some good development practices. Your practice above shows you don’t know what you are doing…
re: Eclipse vs VS SDKs
You realize that Eclipse has $5k versions? You didn’t realize that VS has very powerful free versions? Do some research. The free version of VS is better than Eclipse. The 5K version of VS is better than the 5K version of Eclispse. The free version of SQL Server is better than the free version of MySQL. You can’t use SQL Server for IMMENSE dbs…, but you can’t use MySQL, Oracle, or DB2 either… you’ve got to use Teradata.
re: Features
MSFT will eventually copy all the good stuff and perhaps even come up with innovations itself. The problem with Open Source is that it is Open Source… When I get a plugin from Open Source… I have no idea if it contains malicious code from the Russian Mafia or the Chinese military. “oh wait – you can look at the code”… Yeah – bullshit, I don’t want to review thousands/millions of lines of code. Clever virus/worm writers can do so undetected. Please reference the recent google app plugin that steals every users password… Also – when your plugins are supported by some guy working in his basement in his underwear – good luck with getting support for when it breaks…
I think a feature (which I personally do not like, but others find very useful) that VS has over Eclipse is LINQ. It is a very powerful tool for database integration.
re: in general
I’m not antagonistic toward new languages and tools. I think it’s great that people come up with them and I think open source has it’s place. I’m annoyed by the users of open source and boutique languages thinking that they are inherently superior to .NET users. I think .NET has a much easier learning curve and a much lower entry point than J2EE or LAMP. I think it is nice that new developers have simple way to start learning. I’m tired of the implied moral superiority of J2EE/LAMP devs…. Wow – you use freeware… so what. The top tier J2EE and .NET guys are at the same level. There is plenty of business in both of those streams (I’m not sure the same can be said for LAMP – if a company is too cheap to pay for software, they probably are too cheap to pay a decent wage)…
The money I used in the 80’s and 90’s to buy MSFT operating systems and office software is being used by the Gates Foundation to do things that go beyond software. They do more to address malaria than my government…
>. I’m annoyed by the users of
You are annoyed? Therefor you insult us with:
> open source and boutique languages
Ouch. So, the majority of IT related fortune 500 companies are running boutique languages.
Damn those enterprises. They should be learning to buy products with the name enterprise on it!
>The money I used in the 80’s and 90’s to buy MSFT operating systems and office software is being used by the Gates Foundation to do things that go beyond software. They do more to address malaria than my government…
Sounds like you should be voting for another government. Bill _is_ definately a good man. The robin hood of the 21st century. Steal and extort the rich west and use that money for the greater good.
The funny thing is that your comparision (comparing microsoft with a government) makes more sense than you would have intended. It’s no secret many people refer to windows and office as the microsoft tax. Money purely spent to be compatible.
can we please keep this civil? Right now we’re at the level of disagreement that makes for interesting debate. Don’t become one another’s troll.
@Meneer
Your name sounds South Asian. I’m not sure if you’re aware of the fact that millions of people die from simple preventable causes… clean water, preventative medicine, food… Actually, I believe much of South Asia has these problems.
Perhaps you are 2nd generation or 3rd generation, it doesn’t really matter. Your snarky attitude toward a man who invests billions in charitable works is interesting. He is not investing billions in art or making a building for himself; he is approaching charitable works with a no-nonsense business approach. It could easily be your family helplessly starving to death. If only there were a god who could switch your family out with one that is suffering through no fault of there own so you could learn the things that matter… Perhaps you will get a chance to learn anyway as the world economies appear to be in for bad times…
btw – in a democracy – you don’t get what you voted for a lot of the time… the people in charge of my government are guilty of high crimes and treason – there is nothing i can do about it… well, except for giving dirty looks to anyone who is republican.
Do yourself a favor: skip to lisp and force yourself to get to the point of understanding lisp-style macros. It may take a year or two though.
>Your name sounds South Asian. I’m not sure if you’re aware of the fact that millions of people die from simple preventable causes… clean water, preventative medicine, food… Actually, I believe much of South Asia has these problems.
Meneer means Mister. So, its Mister R to you; and not from South Asia.
And like with my name, i don’t think its wise to make such presumptions about South Asia. Better not label any one as helpless. They might get offended, even when the intentions are good.
>Your snarky attitude toward a man who invests billions in charitable works is interesting.
How was that snarky? I was complimenting the guy. In some parts of the world being called a robin hood and stealing from the rich is considered a compliment.
But things are simply not as black and white. A nice dictator is still a dictator. Even when that person spends all his time and effort helping the needy.
Also, that is really offtopic anyway. If we really reached the point that microsoft’s dominance can no longer be _defended_ by quality, but only excused by the good deads of mr Gates, then i think this discussion is over.
The point that .net being a windows-only tool, locked in on a specific vendor, makes it a bad choice for most of my clients, as well as for a lot of the enterprises. No player is moving _to_ the microsoft-system; it’s just not good sense.
And thankfully, even when you add all that Mr Gates spents to the foreign aid of the USA, i can still proudly claim that my governemt spent more per capita. More of my money. You really don’t need to supress innovation nor hijack capitalism to make a better world.
If you truly buy microsoft products, just to help the world be a better place, you are in denial. No need to finance the lobbyists, the lawyers, nor all the man-hours in making products intentionally incompatible. A lot of charity accept money without spending it on those things.
Since when did Phil Haack become eponymous of what is wrong with MS? People keep linking to him and saying he’s out of touch. I don’t think that’s a fair characterization of Phil. He’s an instance of what’s going RIGHT at Microsoft right now.
@Steve Cooper
That is exactly the kind of changes I was thinking about. It is definitely exciting to see C# push the bounds of static typed languages, and I did like the type inference of Haskell, but I still think there is more power to be had. Namely, I think there is still a lot of unnecessary bloat in C# (and perhaps more so in Java) that could be removed… but still encouraging to see a start!
Intellisense is one thing that may be near impossible with Ruby, though I think Ruby doesn’t have to be inherently so slow. Java was touted as too slow in the beginning and look where it is now. As we explore the possibilities more and improve on them, they will only get better, and with faster and faster (or more cores) processors, the speed issue becomes less and less. Anyways, Ruby supports dropping down to C (and JRuby down to Java), which dramatically increases the possibilities. Have something that is too slow? Implement the critical section in C. I am still hopeful that the benefits of other features in Ruby like open classes, singleton methods and duck typing have a place in the mass market… but one step at a time.
@Matt
You are throwing around words you don’t even understand. ORDER OF MAGNITUDE MEANS A 10x BENEFIT AT LEAST!!! Show me the 10x benefit. Even if you are right that compilation is vastly superior in VS, from my experience I doubt it is even 2x better. And, even if compilation is better than that (highly unlikely), the incremental build feature I mentioned before makes Eclipse compilation less intrusive and basically cancels the gains VS might have. At any rate, you imply an order of magnitude in programming performance… LINQ can’t provide that… small compilation boosts can’t give it… where is the order of magnitude benefit? Stop BSing, and give me some facts, you can’t even point to a feature YOU LIKE that expresses why you prefer VS over Eclipse. Hyperbole and insults and stereotypes won’t win anyone with a brain over.
As for the 4 solutions and many projects, yes I know the purpose of solutions and projects, but this is a big corporate environment, and I had nothing to do with the architecture and layout of the system. These 4 solutions have goals in their structure, some of which makes sense, others don’t, but I rarely use them as is. I always have my own solutions with just a couple projects (the one or few that I am actively working on). Eclipse can do the same thing by the way. But the point was these solutions are for building the application as a whole (each one with a specific part), and such a massive application chokes VS just as much as you implying Eclipse chokes on massive applications. Stop trying to argue your point by putting me or others down… it only makes your point seem all the more uninformed and biased.
If you want to say VS is your preference, fine. Everyone is entitled to opinion, but don’t try to push your opinion as fact, and your preference as an objective “best” when it isn’t, ESPECIALLY when you have barely touched the competition to see if your preference is really grounded in facts and actual productivity. Stereotypes of open source developers and scare tactics of theoretical worms and viruses won’t help either. Sure there is a bad egg here and there, but that’s the risk of ANY software… Microsoft has holes in a lot of their software, intentional or not, which can be as bad or worse than viruses. Did you hear about the bug in firewire for windows that allows you to bypass a locked computer and get access? This developer discovered the hole a year or 2 ago and presented it to Microsoft. Just recently he released how to abuse the hole because Microsoft STILL hasn’t fixed it. My point being, if you are merely pointing your pference, then we have no need to argue. If you really want to claim VS is objectively better than Eclipse… you have to change your way of arguing. Reread the article… you are indicating that you don’t know much if anything about the technologies you are claiming are inferior to your preference. This is EXACTLY what the article is about… YOU! Open your mind and accept that there are alternatives, and personal taste plays a role, otherwise you will only further push the .NET developer stereotype.
@olippold The Scottish invented television!? It was Philo Farnsworth (hence the Futurama character) from Utah.
And you’re welcome.
@Scott
I’ve been saving up my comments for a follow up post since by the time I had a chance to sit down and read the comments there were already 80 of them. However, in this case I thought I would make an exception.
I definitely did NOT intend to point Phil out in a negative way. I follow his blog and have a great deal of respect for him and his contributions to the open source community. I think that hiring Scott Hanselman, Phil Haack, and Rob Conery was one of the best moves that Microsoft could make in terms of reaching out to the larger developer community.
I was at the Alt.NET conference when Guthrie unveiled the MVC framework. I was tremendously impressed with how Scott Guthrie knew the strengths and weaknesses of every web framework out there. I believe he proved beyond a shadow of a doubt to a room full of skeptics that there is a strong contingent in Microsoft that is paying attention to best practices in the industry and what is good about other programming languages.
I mostly linked to Phil’s post because it was memorable to me and indicative of the overwhelming feeling that most .NET developers have when it comes to simply keeping up with the flow of information coming out of Redmond. I mentioned it because, for better or worse, it is simply one of the factors that has prevented me from exploring other languages and frameworks, which I personally think is a prerequisite for becoming a truly good programmer.
I have nothing against Microsoft and don’t necessarily plan to defect to another language any time soon. I just want to have a better understanding of what each language does better and worse than Microsoft.
As long as Microsoft does the same (as I believe they are doing with the MVC framework), then they will continue to be a dominant force in the industry and I will continue to use their products.
@Meneer R – .NET is not windows only – check out the Mono implementation. Specific .NET languages may be, but not all of them, just to be clear.
I was browsing Yahoo Answers and found this comment from a .Net developer:
http://answers.yahoo.com/quest.....556AAogSXo
“i would use asp.net… if your using php
then its gonna be tricky”
The example is a web form where you can build a computer by selecting parts. I can’t see why it would be easier to do this with C# / VB.Net. You can’t do this by dragging and dropping things, so you need to code anyway.
See Wiki, History of Television
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_television
The below discovered or invented the technology that made TV possible:
Willoughby Smith, British, 1873
Paul Julius Gottlieb Nipkow, German, 1884
Karl Ferdinand Braun, German, 1897
Boris Lvovich Rosing, Russian, 1911
Vladimir Kozmich Zworykin, Russian, 1911
John Logie Baird, Scottish, 1925
Philo Farnsworth, American, 1927
John Logie Baird is credited with creatig the first TV system (Electro-mechanical)
Philo Farnsworth is credited with creating the first all electronic TV
@Matt
> If he thinks that learning new languages will
> make him a better developer, he is mistaken…
Other languages force you to think about problems differently. I would guess that someone who had learned PHP (before version 5) would be a better programmer if he had to use C# or Java.
@Mike
When I was using Eclipse to develop a web front end for a mainframe system, the build times were a tremendous annoyance. It made people go take 15 minute minute coffee breaks after they clicked the build button. Then they get distracted with other coworkers, etc… So the build times caused much consternation throughout the organization. This fact alone gave Eclipse a big black eye for the organization trying to develop in Java… There was slight improvement when using the $5k version of it, but it was still painful. In contrast – I don’t care what you are doing, building 4 solutions with multiple projects on a regular basis is pretty retarded. You should not even have access to them. If they are separate product lines they should be packaged and black boxed. There is no way that YOU (should) have write access to 4 solutions with multiple projects in each.
An order of magnitude even as a scientific term is often used as a figure of speech (thanks for letting me know what an order of magnitude is since I didn’t recall while I was getting my advanced degree in biochemistry – I must have missed that somewhere in the lectures)… However, I would hazard that similar apps compiled in Eclipse versus VS take 10-20 times longer to compile. Also, do you understand the difference between bytecode and MSIL (more than looking it up on wiki)?
You don’t even know what LINQ is and what it can do. That feature alone will push some development shops on VS 2008. So you should research before you open your mouth… It basically provides automated schema generation, Data Access Object generation, and Data Object generation, while providing an alternative to SQL. Some shops that are app oriented and not db oriented will move to VS 2008/.NET 3.5 for that fact alone. If you’ve worked with dbs you’d recognize the value that LINQ potentially provides to some shops.
So there are two things that independently make VS an order of magnitude better than Eclipse. I don’t even have to talk about all the easy UI controls you get with the system – and yes you can customize any and all of them.
re: Scare Tactics?
Are you kidding me? There are thousands of malicious apps written for the non-MSFT environments/software (there are thousands targeting MSFT as well). There are security issues with no matter what you use, my point is that if I’m using MSFT, I’ve got someone to blame and an organization with billions in their coffers working on a solution. If you are using some third party plugin for your mission critical app – you will have no one to blame but the person who decided to use the plugin. And yes it happens to *NIX shops, even when they are very well staffed and very experienced.
You are ill informed about the firewire vulnerability. Do you realize that you need physical access to the box to implement the “vulnerability”? If someone you don’t know has physical access to your box, then a firewire vulnerability is the least of your problems… So why don’t you stfu if you don’t know anything… Learn to read more than the headline. On the other hand, go google garchiver… it’s a pretty recent development. All software products will have potential security issues, MSFT gets extra coverage because they are a significant vendor. MSFT is sometimes slow to respond, but at least there is broad coverage. You could have picked dozens of other security issues that MSFT has had (and addressed). All you could do was read a CNN headline….
Again, I don’t have a problem with software tools and technologies. I appreciate that someone took the effort to build and maintain Eclipse and RoR and Java. Constant development of new things by people on the cutting edge of software is a good thing. It provides a way for evolution to occur. But the people I appreciate are the computer scientists – the elite programmers from around the world who do this important research. These people are *orders of magnitude* smarter than you or me or most anyone reading this insignificant blog.
My problem is with tools like you Mike – for you are a tool. There are tools who think that knowing or using something makes them *smart*. You tools are the geek version of the guy in the tank top driving a corvette who thinks he is cool becaues he drives a corvette.
Also, I have used Eclipse, J2EE, MySQL, and open source plugins… I’m sharing my personal experiences with these and the pitfalls that exist for them. And the theoretical worms and viruses are very real. There is a reason responsible open source provide an MD5 (even though it is probably not foolproof)…
And finally, I’ve nowhere stated that .NET is the solution for everything. I’m pushing back against those who bash .NET and/or MSFT proponents. I’m contending that in many cases .NET provides a reasonable software solution to business problems. Many of the ignorant tools (people not software) have suggested that if you go MSFT, you must use all MSFT. This is simply not true – I’ve used .NET with MySQL; I’ve used .NET with Mainframes; I’ve used .NET with proprietary call center software. I’m calling shenanigans on the elitist, comic book reading, pony tail having, pimply faced, ignorant tools who bash my poor newbie .NET developers (who are also comic book reading, pimply faced, overweight dorks…)
@Anon
re: Other languages force you to think about problems differently. I would guess that someone who had learned PHP (before version 5) would be a better programmer if he had to use C# or Java
I agree that languages can push a developer to think one way or another. COBOL and COBOL devs are often maligned for monolithic spaghetti code. Java has a structure than lends itself to good OO principals, while COBOL – not so much. However, I’ve seen beautiful COBOL code built with object-oriented principals. I’ve also seen crap Java code that was monolithic and very spaghetti. My point again being, that it is the developer and not the tool.
You could give Da Vinci some charcoal and a piece of paper and he’ll give you works of art. You could give me an entire design studio and I still couldn’t create art better than a 3 year old…
@Matt
Well, I’m done with this argument. We both are making incorrect assumptions about eachother and getting nowhere trying to argue about personal preference. You label me incorrectly, make false assumptions about what I have said, and further do nothing but insult me for no other sake than to make your own argument seem more valid. I am probably guilty of similar fouls, but believe me when I say I’ve been trying to avoid it… I don’t believe the same is true of you.
To make my final retort (I am gone after this, so beat the dead horse as much more as you wish), I dismissed LINQ because you specifically cite it as a good VS feature but one you don’t personally like… which defeats the purpose, I wanted why YOU like VS… what makes it tick for YOU… because maybe I can learn something new on how to use VS better to my advantage. LINQ as you describe it sounds like Rails, which I don’t personally use… have been meaning to try, but it’s not high on my list because I don’t usually write web apps with database back ends in my spare time.
Furthermore I DID read the firewire bug article in it’s fullest, and I KNEW it was only available if you have access to the PC… see the incorrect assumptions I’m talking about? My point in bringing it up was not that Microsoft is shoddy, but that all software has their problems (open source, proprietary, anything).
I’m sorry for any insults I may have thrown your way, I was trying my best to be objective, though your aggressive attitude has only made me angry which probably let some things slip. I would have appreciated a discussion without such insults on either side, though you seem very free to fling them. Why can’t we talk tech with our brains instead of emotions?
I guess your claim of VS being order of magnitude better just brought out the worst in me, and I still don’t see any hard evidence that it is true, especially when I consider what you say with my own experiences.
If a tool is someone who tries different technologies for fun and personal use and picks the ones they like, reads tech articles because they are enjoyable, then hey… I’m happy to be a tool. At least I know I am weighing the alternatives based on their merits. I don’t think I’m cool or smart for using things like Eclipse and Ruby… I use them because they give me the most enjoyment and power in my programming. My job is a programmer, and my hobby is programming. I do it for the love of it, not to appear smart. I use Ruby because no other language has engaged me so much, and made the already fun task of programming MORE fun.
Let’s both stop being Trolls and add to the discussion like civilized adults. Making eachother angry doesn’t solve anything.
In the meantime I will go take a coffee break as I hit the build button in Visual Studio… because yes, some applications in Visual Studio take that long to build too… each tool can be used effectively, or ineffectively… if you only load the portions of the application you need in eclipse, you will build a lot faster, just like you load small portions in Visual Studio and it will build a lot faster.
@Mike
Quit being mature about things. This is the web – you are supposed to anonymously sling mud.
I’ve been involved in programming and administering Linux systems in a wide variety of languages for over a decade now.
I’m moving on to the .NET stack. Java is too weak of a language compared to C# 3.0 and VB.NET. Ruby, Python, Scala, Groovy, etc…nice languages, but don’t have the integrated stack behind them.
Slashdorks, socialist europeans, islamofascists, and other malcontents around the world are irrelevant to me, and I’d be worried if they did like me.
@Meneer poephol
Ah – you are likely South African then… LOL – you have a government that arguably contends with mine for shame (I still think we have you beat). I didn’t realize you people write software, I thought you still whipped the darkies to do it for you… Forgive my ignorance about your culture (I am American after all).
You’re throwing up a straw man argument. I never said I buy MSFT solely because of its charitable works. I evaluate each new circumstance and try to provide solutions that best serve my customer. In most cases, MSFT is very suitable. In cases where all things are equal, I said I would go with MSFT because of their charitable works.
Your ignorance of MSFT cross platform compatibility is telling. MSFT (as well as IBM and many other companies) was on the forefront of cross system compatibility with COM, COM , COMTI, CORBA, etc. I’ve been involved with integrating .NET solutions with many different platforms.
I would think that an Afrikaaner would know what it means to point a gun to someone’s head and force them to do something. In contrast, MSFT puts products for sale out – and you can choose to buy them or not. I don’t think they “disappear” people that don’t play along – not yet anyway. Do you not see the distinction? You don’t have to buy Word/Excel/Powerpoint – but many people choose to because they are generally decent products that have widespread use (and lots of people are lemmings).
So… when your ancestors forced the dark skinned people to live in certain places and learn (and not learn) certain things and imprisoned or killed them when they didn’t comply – that is what could be construed as oppressive or dictatorial (in the sense of a minority ruling class over a majority slave class).
The migration of people to the U.S. is somewhat comparable to the migration of people to MSFT products… The immigrants come because there is opportunity and they generally come out of their own volition.
@Russell
Sorry man – I didn’t read your other postings. It seems you are quite knowledgeable in quite a few areas and you were non-maliciously poking fun at .NET developers. But take care – we (.NET guys) are not going to take any more crap.
I couldnt agree more. I am a developer consultant that have worked both in the MS and Java world. And the .NET people can only see the great products that comes from MS. If a technology or product doesnt come from MS, then it is utter useless.
I was working at a company which makes community critical software, and they did not know what unit testing was. And I was struck down when I found out that of 2 million LOCs, there were only 1 interface and it wasnt even in use. And we are talking 50 separate components that communicated, why do something abstract when you can rewrite it all the time?
I must say that Im not impressed with the technology interest in C# developers. It feels like the other side is trying to keep up on new technology because they have to otherwise MS would rule the developer world.
@joe (first comment)
And as a Swede, I must say that without us you wouldnt have Ombudsman, Smorgasbord or swedish meatballs.
@Sebastian
Not sure where you get 1% in those numbers. But whatever –it seems you are prone to gross generalizations.
You have a nice theory, but it only explains why MicroSerfs annoy us. Here is the reason why developers who use Microsoft tools and languages are inherently less skilled and less capable:
For the same reason you’d be a lousy decision-maker if you’d lived your whole life in prison. Microsoft doesn’t *have* programming languages exactly, it has tightly managed and controlled scripts that have to ask the system’s permission for every operation.
Everything but Microsoft, and the proprietary companies writing the app software for Microsoft, live in the open source world. Of course non-Microsoft programmers are more capable; they’ve SEEN source code! Even before they wanted to! They are allowed to make their own decisions. They have not just open source, but free learning tools and free programming tools until it’s just running out their ears.
I have a stunning revelation for MS programmers: it’s called “code” because it’s – gasp! – TEXT! Typed in with a KEYBOARD! Yes, I know, you think the little box you live in with the paint-by-number Visual Studio IDE is all there is to the world.
And that’s just what someone who’d spent their whole lives in prison would think.
Download a copy of Linux. Don’t even start the desktop, just stay in that console and prowl the system. You have a dozen programming languages that came free with the distro, and not just the crippled version either. You have books worth of documentation; learn it all! Then go find more free stuff to download and learn all that too! This is what fresh air smells like. This is what running feels like without somebody holding your hand.
Learn Microsoft if you want a job. Learn everything but Microsoft if you want to be the boss.
Nice article, I guess in the end it all comes to the fact that we people are fundamentalists by nature and it comes a bit hard to us to walk a mile in the other man’s shoes.
I am not a .NET developer, but I admit I used to think of them in a fundamentalist way as you described in your article but, as you, I realized that the programming world is a bigger place and started to look beyond my own fence.
I guess what you described is valid not only for .NET developers, but for the other side also and I think many of these different views would converge if we would just make a small effort in understanding and learning from each other.
@MATT, the biggot:
>I would think that an Afrikaaner would know what it means to point a gun to someone’s head and force them to do something.
Again, you’ve guessed wrong.
Again, you insulted another country.
Again, without any real knowledge of the country.
Really, whatever country i’m from, you’r gonna find something, likely untrue, to shit on and use as a personal attack.
Things you could possible say:
What if I’m from Japan? “After the nuclear bomb I should know better than call Microsoft ..”
What if I’m from Germany? “Well, aften the whole hitler thing, i don’t have any moral grounds to say about Microsoft ..”
What if I’m white? “Well, aften the suppression of the black man, white people can’t claim about microsoft .. ”
What if I’m a woman? “Well, really what does a woman know about IT? I better know my place and not talk shit about .. ”
What if I’m from russia? “Well, being a communist i’m the last one to have the right to say anything about monopolies .. ”
etc. etc. We could go on forever like this.
The fact is, MATT, you are a rascist, a biggot and a fascist.
What difference does it really make what country i’m from? Why go there? Honestly, tell us:
WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?
If I as short-sigthed as you are, i would by know, view all .NET developpers as KKK-leaning biggots with black-and-white-mindset and insecurity-issues about themselves, their country and their choices.
But I am not, and I am sure most .NET developpers would be equally disguted by you as I am.
Is it so hard to wrap around in your hard that using a Microsoft product is bad sense for a company, because for a large part, its extortion, which is not very uncommon in the IT market. It is also not with a gun to any one’s head. Shades of grey. Not black and white. But stop acting like Microsoft is an angel, they never were and never will be.
You’ve just gone some way to prove his point Joe.
Your choices were Scottish, English, USA, German, USA inventions (respectively).
disclaimer – I’m english but trying my best not to dislike americans.
Well, I’m an American who reads about other nations’ cultures and history before I visit them — but I’m a socially inept, boring Aspie nerd. I think one of the reasons America is hated around the world is pretty much the same reason I was picked on as a kid — an inability or unwillingness to submit to peer pressure to act like all the other countries.
In the late 1960s it was hip to listen to Karl Marx and the Beatles; today national self-loathing (among 1st-world countries) and victim disarmament at the individual level is hip — and there goes America with its religion and NRA, refusing to pay deference to fashion (or worse yet, oblivious to it).
As for the analogy to Microsoft — it’s not a perfect analogy but there’s something to it. Like America, Microsoft is simply too powerful to ignore and shun, so you have to taunt and ridicule it. The egocentrism and ignorance of the outside world within Microsoft culture is also analogous; many times I have become frustrated with Microsoft’s chutzpah in inventing their own terminology and using it within instruction books without defining terms — as if everyone in the world should know already know what their terms mean.
There is one basis for suspecting the competency of Microsoft tool users as compared with, say, Java users. Java SE and Swing were designed to have a powerful, elegant, comprehensible API. In the Win32 world, however, things are never as they seem; I feel like I have to be more of a lawyer than a mathematician (adapting examples rather than reasoning from first principles) to get anything done. So Microsoft provided tools that generated massive amounts of code for you, promising that as long as you don’t try to do anything too creative you won’t have to know how exactly the code really works. This is, however, a stereotype that doesn’t always hold; JSF is as bad as anything Microsoft has come up with in that regard — and done less well, I might add. (Wicket brings Java web development back to Java’s philosophical roots; I hope it becomes dominant.)
Having read Raymond Chen’s book _The Old New Thing_, however, I realize that much of the ugliness of Microsoft’s APIs stem from its origin in slow, low-power micro-computers that required hacks and special cases galore to make do with a ridiculously small amount of memory, and the unending imperative to remain upwardly compatible with that mess. Its most popular tools were first sold mainly to amateur hobbyists. The Unix world of more powerful mini-computers didn’t have to make so many ugly compromises; and they could assume that users of their APIs would have the time and intelligence to assimilate a comprehensive way of doing things, rather than relying on wizards. Naturally, time gradually fades these cultural differences.
>an inability or unwillingness to submit to peer pressure to act like all the other countries.
1) America is not hated.
Why else would we watch your shows? In europe for example, nobody critisizes america more than their own culture or government. It’s not the result of some intellectual guilt trip either: how else are things going to chance when nobody is pointing at them? However, the rethoric is much less strong than say the average Fox News comment or the daily show. Its a character trait of us, that americans sometimes seem to relate to them. They think its something about them that makes us critize them; its not. We critize everything; in a diplomatic pc correct term though.
2) it’s not peer pressure
We really could care less about your internal laws concerning guns and things like that. It’s the part where your government tends to have some control issues with the rest of the world. It’s not peer pressure, we’re not even at the point of a dialogue, let alone us being able to ‘pick on you’. When was the last time any country flew to the your native soil and bombed the crap out of it? Nobody is picking on you. You just want us shut up as well and accept your authority. Peer pressure is far far stretch for reality.
3) There is no ‘fashion’ of ideas.
Even the assumption the rest of the world all agrees on where we need to be heading, and that there is some kind of ‘fashion’. From Russia to China, to Europe to Africa to the Middle-east. We don’t agree on anything. And we all critize each other. But when you only pay attention to what is said about the US, it might appear like a us-vs-them situation, but it surely is not.
4) America matters more
America is the dominant world force, litterally by force. They represent the largest economic and military powerblock. Europe might be compareable if you add it all up, but it does not have one culture, nor central authorty. You have _one_ guy deciding to spent all your money on a war. That makes America a force to be reckoned with.
So, just because people critize you, it doesn’t mean that we would prefer some other power-block to be your successor. It’s hard to get any sense into you guys, the middle-east answers most questions with violence, russia is even more corrupt and china is, although not power-hungry, isn’t exactly the symbol of freedom either.
=== In short ===
If I were you, i would start worrying when we _stop_ trying to convince you and just give up and vote for the other guy. At least for Europe you can say that as long as we critize you, our loyalty is still with you.
Sounds like a case of Software Ethnocentrism, I’ve also been battling this beast..
I came across a related quote from Rick Steves:
“… I think Americans tend to be some of the most ethnocentric people on the planet. It’s not just Americans, it’s the big countries. It’s the biggest countries that tend to be ethnocentric or ugly. There are ugly Russians, ugly Germans, ugly Japanese and ugly Americans. You don’t find ugly Belgians or ugly Bulgarians, they’re just too small to think the world is their norm.”
I hope your shots are up to date. Traveling to third world languages you are bound to contract something.
In response to Meneer R:
I don’t think Americans resent criticism in principle. It’s undeniable that controversial policies are debatable, and it is foolish to think that America never makes mistakes, or that — mistake or not — most decisions are vulnerable to legitimate reasons for disagreement.
What upsets Americans about criticism from western allies is their use of hyperbole — criticisms that, if taken literally, would indeed suggest or imply deep hatred of America. Let me give a few examples.
When, in the run-up to the Iraq war, Europeans said, “I think this is a bad idea, and I really resent the fact you are doing this” — that’s a reasonable thing to say. But when someone expresses this by carrying in a demonstration a placard reading, “Regime change in America, not Iraq!” — taken literally it suggests that in comparing Bush to Saddam Hussein you consider Saddam to be the better man. Considering the depth of Saddam’s evil, that was a very hateful thing to say.
An Italian newpaper polled its readers as to the country they consider to be the greatest threat to world peace and they responded saying America. Now, perhaps the readers considered their choice to be simply a way of expressing frustration with us, but taken literally it means that the prospects for world peace would be improved by sudden disapperance of American influence and power from the world, leaving the world in the hands of the powers that remain. Your post indicates that you don’t truly believe that, but that’s the implication.
When an English-born newspaper columnists reacts to an execution in Texas by saying, “We believe capital punishment is barbaric and there is no place for it in any civilized country” — well, that would suggest he believes that America, having a place for capital punishment as it does, is barbaric and uncivilized. Again, this is probably hyperbole; he probably meant “We deeply oppose capital punishment.” (Presumably he didn’t really mean to imply that it was a barbaric and uncivilized city which stood up to the Blitz in the 1940s. But taking his words literally …)
Or consider the Canadian columnist who wrote, “In a civilized country there is no justification for allowing private citizens to possess deadly weapons in preparation for use in self-defense.” Again, that may be hyperbole, but taking it literally, it is difficult for Americans to imagine that Canadians do not hold us in deep contempt, convinced of our barbarity. Perhaps if he’d said what he meant, it might have sounded more like, “When it comes to private ownership of firearms, our cost/benefit calculation comes to a different conclusion. In part, that is because we differ with Americans as to the relative value of the life of a criminal as he issues a violent threat, versus a citizen’s right not to be victimized by such people.”
I sympathize with the American reaction because, suffering from mild Asperger’s Syndrome as I do, my natural tendency is to take words literally. (As you can imagine, I do not handle small talk very well.) My personal inclination is to say that people ought to be logically precise in the things they say, but my personal experience is that if I’m going to wait for Neurotypicals to change then I have a very long wait in front of me!
But still, I think people in sensitive and responsible positions of influence ought at least to try.
I liked this post. There are two audiences IMO – the developers using MS technologies, and the creators of MS technologies themselves. Two different ethnical groups subject to different constraints (e.g. when a MS employee I could not look at Eclipse source, because of IP implications, and I wished them the best at what they did, as it would push the whole user base forward but that’s another story), and both audiences(as everyone else) could learn more by learning about more diverse environments.
One thing I found in my real-world travels, is that in the end the language people speak (or don’t) matters little if they share a desire to communicate. A universal language of smiles and gestures and sketches in the dirt takes over. And when people don’t want to communicate, not even speaking the same language will allow them to do so.
Maybe in your own explorations you will uncover new patterns and approaches that help build bridges and common understanding across the (much-needed) eco-diversity of technology, and I hope you keep an eye out for these and share them along the way!
@fsilber
You sound like a very reasonable human being. I can’t imagine how one would experience the world if all was taken literally.
I also think that the hyperboles of all sides always draw the most attention. When we hear or see americans on our tv talk about politics, we hear extreme rhetorics. “If you are not with us, you are against us”. This little phrase, spoken by your president, aired about a couple thousands times.
We also, perhaps mistakingly, assume the only way our opinions are heard, is when we communicate them in a somewhat offending way. There is indeed a lot of emotion involved. We definately sound angry. We don’t have these emotions with africa or the middle-east. People tend to only get angry at their friends and family; at people they care about. Our natural reaction to people we truly don’t like is to just ignore them. You might not like it when some stranger does something you do not approve of. But if it’s your wife, or children, you are much more likely to get at mad at them because of it.
What i was trying to say, is that the emotionally loaded opinions in Europe about the United States, is actually a sign that we look at you like family.
Nevertheless, the little tidbits of our opinion about the US, that you do receive, are not the average opinion. Would you have read about the poll of that italian newspaper if the opinion was much more balanced? I don’t think so.
So I think the media has part of the blame in such communication issues. Both our media focus on the shocking or disturbing commentary.
And that does not only affect our relationship, but this is something that is happening all over the world.
You know how many people in the middle-east have ever burned an american flag? 0,000001%
But of all the muslims you see on TV, how many look angry while burning a flag? It is disproportional.
What if Al-Jazeera goes to the states and interviews KKK members? What if they keep broadcasting those images more than any other of america? What would a KKK member say about muslims?
I am an European, but I try to read newspapers and consume media from all over the world. So i think i’m going to bring this point home by quoting John Stewart from the Daily Show.
In the context of the polarization in the united states between the republicans and democrats, he claimed that a huge majority of americans would easily come to agreement if they would just sit down and talk to each other. It’s just the political interests and media that obscure that proccess.
I think this principle scales to a much greater extend than just america. It is likely true for world politics as well.
And if you ever travel outside of the USA, you would notice that even finding someone that will be unfriendly or disrespectfull because of your country, is going to a very difficult task.
Those people seem to exist only when the camera’s are running.
I hope I haven’t said any hyperboles, but for me it’s difficult. I like arguing using comparisions, and symbolics. Often, its not the proportion of the statement, but the idea behind it, I am trying to get accross. This might be true for a lot of people.
@fsilber
About that italian poll. You have to put it into context.
I also think the USA is the biggest threat to world peace. You are also the biggest chance.
The thing is, you are the most dominant political, economical and military force. Therefor, by default, for world-peace, what you do matters most.
And we do believe that you are in dangerous political waters. Your democracy is in a grey zone, your accountability and the credibility of your politicians and your media seem complety gone. Your corporate elite hold themselves to no moral standard, willing to not only sacrify the world, but even their country and their people, just for profit.
Given the impact that your country had on the world, that worries everybody.
We don’t consider Russia or China a threat to world peace because they behave so much better, but because they have less impact on the final outcome.
So, even I, and I definately do not hate america, could have voted for the USA when asked that question.
The future of the world is your hands, not ours.
So, by default, you are the biggest threat _and_ the biggest opportunity.
>>joe on February 25th, 2008
>>
>>Most people in the world may not like us, but
>>whether they want to admit it or not they are
>>better off because of us. Each time they turn
>>on the TV or a personal computer, surf the net,
>>talk on a telephone, drive a car, fly in an
>>airplane it is a tacit endorsement of American
>>culture.
Helloooo!
I don’t dislike Americans per se (unless perhaps they are of a certain Bush family) but come on. how many of the technologies that you list do you REALLY think Americans brought to the world???
Here are the generally accepted inventors / concept-makers. You should consider these because as the author of this blog points out, your ignorance it what irritates people from other countries.
TV – generally Baird – Scottish
Computer (Programmable) – Babbage – English
Internet – Licklider and Taylor – American
Telephone – disputed, one of:
> Meucci (1857) – Italian
> Reis (1860) – German
> Bell (1876) – American
> Gray (1876) – American
Car (Steam) – Verbiest – Flemish
Car (Modern) – Benz – German
Aeroplane – disputed (a lot)
> Wright Brothers – American
> Dumont – Brazilian
> and many others
Meneer R:
Part of the problem is domestic politics. When the Democratic Party wants to score points against the Republican Party, they say, “President Bush has caused people who were formerly our allies to hate us!” When we hear that, we walk away thinking, “Our former allies hate us.” I mean, it’s not as though I had any choice but to vote for Bush; his opponents in 2000 and 2004 wanted to require handgun registration. (So long as the federal government refuses to admit that having them is an individual right, overturning on Constitutional grounds those bans or strict restrictions that currently exist in a few American cities, we don’t feel we can trust the government with this information.)
As for Bush’s statement, “If you are not with us, you are against us” — again, he was not speaking about the war in Iraq specifically, but rather about the acceptance of the tactic of using of unofficial, non-uniformed fighters who target noncombatants purely for the sake of imposing fear and misery (what Bush called “terrorism”).
Of course, Saddam Hussein was one of the world leaders who financed and trained such fighters and promoted the use of these tactics; so if the world is was to reject terrorism (or whatever you prefer to call the above concept), it had to reject Saddam Hussein. That didn’t mean everyone had to actually send soldiers against him. (It did mean that nobody could reasonably remain his friend and ally, if terrorism were to be rejected.)
Sadly, we couldn’t obtain such a consensus against the-use-of-unofficial-nonuniformed-fighters-who-target-noncombatants-purely-for-the sake-of-gaining-vengeance-through-the-imposition-of-fear-and-misery (I cannot use the word “terrorism” because so many defenders of this tactic insist on redefining the word, and I see no point in arguing over word meanings); at best we have the Shadenfreud of seeing the users, approvers and excusers of these tactics begin to have these tactics applied against themselves (sometimes in disputes between rival terrorist movements).
You say, “Your democracy is in a grey zone, your accountability and the credibility of your politicians and your media seem complety gone. Your corporate elite hold themselves to no moral standard, willing to not only sacrify the world, but even their country and their people, just for profit.” Well, the elections followed our pre-set rules; they never guaranteed that the individual majority vote would win; and though that is usually the case there have been exceptions in the past. It’s one thing when a minority party seizes power; in this case the vote was extremely close to 50%-50% — and if it had gone the other way (Democrats winning a majority of electoral college votes with a slight minority of the popular vote), believe me, they would not have given up their victory.
Our media has indeed damaged its credibility for the sake of partisan politics. (Even though you probably consider them right-wing, they’re well to the left of the American political center.) But with the rise of the Internet it hasn’t been able to get away with as much mischief as in the past. So many people read the news online, and so many stories allow users to enter comments for all to see, the use of blatant disinformation now backfires against them.
The corporate elite is more worrisome. Our current troubles stem from extremely selfish, shortsighted, and irresponsible behavior in the mortgage industry — and everyone who knew about it yet declined to speak out. Also worrisome is the decline in moral principle among the people — and many businesses are eager to take advantage of it. When houses went up in price, instead of thinking, “Oh darn, now my property taxes will increase — and I still owe just as much to the bank as I ever did!” — many people took out additional mortgages and spent the money. There seems to be a growing number of people who neigher expect nor intend to acquire wealth even when given the opportunity — who instead think it’s normal to have a negative net worth, buying only through the use of borrowed money, using earned income only for paying down debts.
For example, employers are required to estimate workers’ tax liabilities and send the government deposits subtracted from workers’ pay throughout the year. An annual accounting is done in which some people have to send more money and others, whose employers over-reserved, get some back. An industry has developed which not only computes where you stand, but if you overpaid will buy your refund by offering you less money sooner. The rate of interest is abusive, but they pander to workers’ emotional immaturity with commercials in which actors whose accountants do not offer these abusive loans fume against them complaining, “_My_ tax preparers don’t offer that service. I have to __WAIT__ for my money! And I could _really_ use that money __NOW__!”
I think it’s quite possible that this is the beginning of end of the “American era.”
Oh, and I would have thought that the biggest threat to world peace would have been the people calling for for world-wide warfare (the Jihadists). But again, that may be my fault for assuming that people mean what they say.
@fsilber
>” When we hear that, we walk away thinking, “Our former allies hate us.”
The democrats are right to warn you that people in general stopped _trusting_ america. That will have (and already has) enormous political and economical consequences. Your government intentionally lied to us and has up to now, not even apologized. And our soldiers were there too, you know.
>handgun registration .. Constitutional grounds
Although I think the whole idea of blaming violence of weapons is idiosyncracy, if I had to pick between the right-to-bare-arms or the rest-of-your-constitution, I would prefer to keep the rest.
I can’t possible understand how any one could vote for the republicans assuming they mess less with human rights.
But that is all not our (direct) concern. I guess you get what you vote for.
But currently America is about as free as China, when you compare basic human rights. Which is an enormous change of course. Also, you might not experience that in every day life, but neither do the chinese. Modern suppression doesn’t micro-manage. You can say what you what, as long as no-one is listening.
>Well, the elections followed our pre-set rules; they never guaranteed that the individual majority vote would win;
I wasn’t referring to technicalities. I was referring to the whole dynamics. You need a transparent independent media, you need the ability to create a bottom up party and get them on the ballot. You need to expect of your leaders to be directly questioned by media. You need overlap in the intellectual debate about policy and media coverage. You need independent justice system that will not allow itself to be used for political purposes.
You don’t fix that with rules. The problem is a cultural one. I can’t really pinpoint a cause from over here, but on the top of my hat, i would come up with:
– the lack of balls of the intellectuals. (they need to claim that position in steering the debate; no room for empty rhetorics)
– the lack of loyalty of the corporate elite (they are responsible for keeping the media independent to get the best government and make the most money on the long term)
– the lack of political engagement of the average american man
– the lack of transparent governance in the past
– two party system that gets to elect public servants (they should only be allowed to fire them when they are not directly following official documented orders)
– two party system that joins forces to prevent new parties from forming
>Even though you probably consider them right-wing, they’re well to the left of the American political center
I don’t think this is true. They shouldn’t have a political focus at all. I mean, i’ve seen fragments only off course, but things like:
“Do we really want a smoker for president?”
Seems like pure pro republican propaghanda to me. I’ve never seen the ‘do we really want a cocaine addict for president?’
I mean, that’s just a personal, politically motivated attack. That’s quite different from reporting on a study that shows that there are more terrorists now than before.
It does seem they all have a political bias, but there is a difference between lying, implying, slander and being selective with the truth.
Also, a liberal bias is to be expected. On average people that work in media oriented companies are better educated, and on average higher educated people tend to be more liberal. What i’m trying to say is that CNN’s so-called liberal bias is likely an unintentional side-effect of the world-view of the reporters, whereas the conservative bias of fox seems deliberate.
I don’t know, maybe I just don’t like fox because I want them to take more of an effort when lying to me.
>I cannot use the word “terrorism” because so many defenders of this tactic insist on redefining the word, and I see no point in arguing over word meanings
I like your definition better anyway
The problem with labels is that they are so easily abused.
Like freedom meaning safety in america. We don’t like freedom as much, because we view the term to mean anarchy. The police locking up criminals would mean less freedom (for criminals), yet a nicer place to live.
Again, we seem to agree, but the terminology and rethorics (terrorist, freedom) make it appear as though we are at opposites when really we are not.
>The corporate elite is more worrisome.
The only thing that keeps the corporate elite from destroying themselves is a strong goverment that favors long-term-investment over short-term-profit.
But that requires that the american people stop voting for corruptable politicians. And they are definately not all corruptable. I mean, Ron Paul, doesn’t seem like the perfect president to me, but at least he won’t steal millions of your tax dollars like the current republican president.
Likewise Obama on the other side, also has a nice track record of not bending for money. Hillery and Mc’Cain on the other hand …
Also, as you appear to be a bush-voter. Are you aware that he and his vice president have huge stock portfolio in halliburton and the carlyle group. So a lot of the, 20,000 dollars each american on average has spent on the war, ended up in their pockets.
Europe might appear pacifistic, but trust me, no politician here would be foolish enough to pull that off. We would, literally, kill them.
Then again, because of the spread of power in Europe, its much easier to rebel. Much like the iraqi’s can fall back to iran, we have all these nice open borders to fall back to.
It was also the main reason we voted against a super-europe. We feared the same abuse of power as in the States, when we centralize that much control. I am so happy, we killed that baby.
>I think it’s quite possible that this is the beginning of end of the “American era.”
That would cheer me up, if there was a good alternative. But there isn’t. Actually, that situation would compare well to the political field just before WO I.
It might require another world war or two, to figure out who the new boss is. Guess I should be planning to have kids soon.
>Of course, Saddam Hussein was one of the world leaders who financed and trained such fighters and promoted the use of these tactics;
This is completely not true. Al Quada was one of Saddam’s biggest enemies. Al Quada is a group of muslim fundamentalists. Saddam actually separated church and state. He was, at that point in time, an american puppet. Off course this puppet didn’t only think he was better than Allah, he also stopped listining to his American masters and invaded Kuwait. Then America turned on their no- longer-loyal puppet. Saddam became an enemy because he was no longer following your orders, not because he supported terrorism (he didn’t), not because he oppressed his own people (he was still an ally when he ordered that poision gass from you guys and murdered about 200,000 kurds with it.)
A lot of the kids that survived the america-sponsored genocide by Saddam joined Al Quada to help destroy Saddam and America.
So, how should we see the Iraq in the light of 9/11?
Well, the war on iraq meant that the united states was actually giving IN on the demands of Al Quada. They removed ONE evil dictator they PUT there.
Off course this is not going to be enough. You shouldn’t negotiate with terrorists and if you do, you should lie about it to your own people, pretending you are actually fighting Al Quada in Iraq.
Off course that lie wasn’t enough to convice the rest of the world. Most politicans actually know their history. So they fabricated the lie of weapons of mass destruction. Off course, most politicians still knew this too was not true, but at least they had a plausible story to tell their own citizens (like me!) why they went and supported our ally.
So, my country too, (the netherlands) went into iraq. Off course we are a small country, so it was more of symbolic in the big scheme of things. (it was not symbolic for us though, some of our soldiers got killed as well)
The truth is, these terrorist aren’t going to stop until you overthrow the puttet in Saudi-Ariabia and stop financing Israel’s occupation of Palestina.
And I think we really reached a point where you need to ask yourself, why do you want to control of every square inch of the middle-east?
America is now contemplating attacking Iran. The only real democracy in the middle-east. That’s how much you are about spreading freedom.
Iran, even with its dumbass leaders, should be your biggest ally.
Also, ironically, you know who also owns a lot of your industrial complex? The saudi-royal family.
So, when you do the math, who is financing the terrorists? You are. With your taxes. Generating profit for Halliburton and the Carlyle Group.
Unlike most democrats, I don’t think your president is foolish. He made a lot of money, he threw Al Quada a bone (removing Saddam) and he found a nice way to deal with the lower incomes for which there weren’t going to be any jobs in the future anyway. And by making sure Al Quada stays financed, he also made sure that you guys keep being scared. At least then you’ll keep voting corrupted republicans.
And no, i’m not suggesting some conspiracy. Corrupted politicians just take advantage of the situation. Without 9/11 i’m sure he would have found another way to fill his pockets.
>Oh, and I would have thought that the biggest threat to world peace would have been the people calling for for world-wide warfare (the Jihadists). But again, that may be my fault for assuming that people mean what they say.
The jihadist are as dangerous as the KKK.
Just a small group of nutcases.
The thing is, America is creating more terrorist faster than Al Quada can recruit and train them.
Not only that, but where does the money come from to finance them? From oil, from Saudi-Arabia, from the profit of american industrial complex, from the bin laden family.
Thanks to the war in Iraq a number of military companies are making a lot of profit. A lot of that money goes to the stockholders.
Guess where they live?
I’m no conspiracy nut. But these are know facts, go check sources if you like.
Again, America is much better at destroying their own country than Bin Laden is. They are must better at convincing muslims they should become a terrorist.
We do not fear your INTENT.
But we fear your lack of JUDGEMENT.
[...] the navy, see the world. Are .NET Developers the American Tourists of the Software Industry? As a theory, not so far fetched: For example, If you are an American and meet someone who is well [...]
“Most people in the world may not like us, but whether they want to admit it or not they are better off because of us. Each time they turn on the TV or a personal computer, surf the net, talk on a telephone, drive a car, fly in an airplane it is a tacit endorsement of American culture.”
Every time I turn on a TV (rarely) I wince in pain whenever I see Americans being American. Same goes for any other form of media. It’s not a tacit endorsement. People only watch it because there’s no other choice. American “culture” is the catch-all on the if statement. It’s the bottom of the barrel. It’s the swill of mediocrity.
Let’s run some numbers:
%age of yanks that believe the world likes them = 98%.
%age of yanks that realise the world hates them = 2%
%age of yanks that realise the world hates them (and understand why) = 0%
The author is right in comparing .NET developers to Americans. He didn’t really take the analogy far enough.
Let’s compare:
People hate Microsoft because they are anticompetitive to the point of being beligerent. People hate Americans because they destroy other countries in wars without a second thought. Think of how a virus spreads.
People hate Microsoft because they believe (wrongly) that their way is the only/best way and all other software pales in comparison. People hate Americans because they believe (wrongly) that their culture is the only/best culture all other cultures pale in comparison.
Microsoft produces crappy, buggy, bloated software in pretty packaging. America produces mediocre, low standard of living, uneducated, ignorant citizens, with rims on their cars.
Microsoft employers honestly believe they work for the best company in the world but have no idea what the best companies in the world are doing. Americans honestly believe they live in the best country in the world, despite the fact that, in just about every measure for standard of living, they are way, way down the list (below 30th in most categories).
Microsoft promotes assimilation with their product. They couldn’t care less about integration. Americans supports assimilation with their culture. They couldn’t even spell integration.
Microsoft take perfectly good languages e.g. C , Java and bastardises them into poor imitations. America takes a perfectly good language e.g. English and waters it down into drivel.
I could go on…
Essentially, a few hundred years ago, some puritans left for America because they thought they were better than everyone else and had the force of God’s righteousness behind them that gave them license to bring God’s justice to others as they see fit. It’s 2008. Nothing has changed.
I’m not saying my country rocks. I’m from Australia. We’re descendents of convicts who were shipped off to some remote island to die. I know this. I don’t go around with my head in the clouds believing any different.
QED
re: Politics
The ignorance (and I don’t mean it insulting – I mean it literally) of most of us astounds me…
I’m American and proud to be American for certain things. We used to have an open society. Our citizens are generally well meaning.
When I talk about ignorance, I’m looking at our citizenry and apparently you internationals as well…
* The U.S. is one of the few nations to successfully commit genocide. Not so many whooping Indians around here any more (plenty of the turbanned ones around, but not the indigenous).
* The U.S. constitution stated that the non-whites are 3/5 of a man…
* The U.S. did not (militarily) win WWII – we (intelligently) let Britain and Russia exhaust themselves with the Germans and then cleaned up afterward and claimed all the glory. The Russians fought 2/3 of the German forces; The Brits, Americans, French, and Brit Allies fought the other 1/3. My hats off to the Germans – you guys are bad asses.
* Do you know about Whitman? He was a U.S. military officer who went in to conquer Latin America and attempted to do so violently.
* Do you really know what banana republics are? They are our corporations going in and screwing up other countries and creating slaves and messing up democracy.
* The Arabs have a right, I dare a say a duty, to hate Americans. We prop up the Zionist regime that is committing atrocities against a minority people. We have military bases in their holy lands. I’m not particularly fond of Arab culture, but they definitely have a right to have a little rageahol against our policies.
* more recent history… We are directly/indirectly involved in the deaths of 1 million civilian Iraqis. WTF- we spend trillions of dollars to do this so that our current corrupt regime can personnally profit (see dick cheney stock going up by millions of dollars)…
* I’m actually proud of our Serbian action. We didn’t have any economic interests, but we helped an oppressed people without going overboard and causing a regional or international war.
* We have regularly assassinated figures from other countries. We have regularly tried to influence the outcomes (sometimes covertly and sometimes open war) of other countries internal affairs.
I think most nations have plenty to be ashamed of, but I think we have done exceedingly well in this area. I’m looking at you Britain, Germany, Israel… In fact, I think the mosted despised tourist popluation is not American… It is Israeli. I found that the natives generally loathe serving the Israeli soldiers that are on their after service vacation.
BTW – there are plenty of us Americans who do know why the world should hate us… We are amazed that we are not hated more… Thank goodness for ignorance.
Let me see if I can get this thread back on topic…
As an IT S/W Development Manager and new to my organization managing .Net developers on contract to me, what Russell mentions in his email is very true. Case in point:
We (meaning the organization that works for me) developed a small e-procurement app in .Net, very well done BTW and I am CERTAIN done quickly (~2.5 months calendar time with 2 developers from the team) and reliably; in no doubt thanks to the integrated .Net environment. The users and management are happy (although it has not gone into production yet). Am I happy as the new manager walking in the door? Not exactly… And let me explain why…
1) Since I work for the Federal Gov’t, I don’t want to promote vendor lock-in even though the agency and Department I work for is MS-centric currently. This is entirely a MS stack, if I wanted to change just the serverOS or web server – it would be a total rewrite. Not exactly the best for life-cycle maintenance if I find that the app needs to change. I could also throw in that with this lock-in I am forced to pay for licenses thet with an OSS stack I wouldn’t have to… And I mean teh commodity stuff, not the developer tools. The OS, web server, and database – we are not doing anything special – Linux, Apache, and MySql would have worked just fine.
BUT EVEN MORE IMPORTANTLY,
2) NNO ONE on this team even did ANY checking to see if anything like this even existed (to Russell’s point). As I listened to the roll-out plan, a nagging voice in my head kept saying that something simple like this had to already have been done. back at my desk – 15 minutes of refining my Google searches reveals several commercial (some windows based, others not) e-procurement apps (I’m talking small things, not big ERPs). Additionally, I found an open source one that does ALMOST EVERYTHING we wanted and a bunch more. What it did not provide was a workflow that could be based on anything more monetary thresholds (i.e. if you want over $X or X pounds sterling or whatever other currency you wnated to use) then it would bump to the next higher level of approval authority. I need an ability to use the fact whether the item is on a contract or not for determining an approval authority. A quick posted question to their forums confirmed this within 24 hours (with zero time being on a phone with tech support or a pre-sales engineer). So I downloaded the app, opened the zip file to understand how the files are organized. I’m not a programmer, but more of an analyst/architect in my past, but I located the three workflow-related Ruby classes in about 2 minutes.
So within say 1 day and 20 minutes, I confirmed it could have been done another way. And let me throw this to you, I am guessing that with some Ruby knowledge, the workflow changes I needed so I could use a non-monetary approval could be made in a week (I don’t need it configurable – only able to do the change I need). Some CSS work and one would never know it was an off-the-shelf project, say another week with that… that’s with testing mind you. Presume I have to put some expenditure into one of my senior .Net developers to get up to speed on Ruby enough to work with just this area of the code – ok, 1 month (although if teh person is a good programmer, it shouldn’t take that long). So in 1.5 months total I could have had a more flexible solution. (BTW, perhaps one of the commercial products I saw would have even been even closer!)
1.5 months because I looked outside the .Net box vs. 2.5 months staying in it. Perhaps less license fees too (meaning, the database would have been MySQL, the web server probably Apache, but we still probably would have deployed onto Windows). Hmmmm…. which sounds like a better use of our tax payer’s money? Again, not because .Net was bad or taht Ruby was better, but merely because .Net developers usually do NOT look outside of MS-oriented solutions. BTW, this is my recent anecdote, I’ve seen the same stuff over the last 4 years with MS developers. I have always had the blessing (until now) of managing teams that were heterogeneous in the languages and architectures they used – this is my first homogeneous one.
So Russell, I am glad you are looking outside. While it slow down your ability to keep up with everything MS offers, at least you will have awareness outside the box and add more tools to what you need and should know to be a great developer (.Net and/or otherwise) as opposed to simply being a great .Net programmer.
Paul
PS – BTW, I have seen this phenomena a bit with Java developers as well, although it is a little less prevalent.
Meneer R: “Your government intentionally lied to us and has up to now, not even apologized. And our soldiers were there too, you know.” About weapons of mass destruction, right? Actually, I believe our government was truly surprised not to find them. I’ve read that Saddam deliberately created the impression he had them as a way of impressing other countries in the region. Did Bush lie to you? No. Was he an incompetent bumbler to be fooled by the likes of Saddam? Maybe. But I think he was in good company.
“if I had to pick between the right-to-bare-arms or the rest-of-your-constitution, I would prefer to keep the rest.” I think it’s less of an either-or than an “all or nothing.” Our limitations on domestic police power depended on having a population not totally dependent upon police for protection. People who are taught to submit to criminals’ demands rather than fight back tend to back out when it’s time to testify against the most dangerous criminals — a void can only be filled by more intense police surveillance and fewer rights for the accused.
The general attributes of our political system are pretty much the way they’ve always been. Not perfect, but could have been worse; it has a much more stable track record than most European democracies. (Switzerland’s democratic pedigree, I must admit, is much more impressive.)
“But currently America is about as free as China, when you compare basic human rights. Which is an enormous change of course.” Yes, China has made enourmous advances in the past 15 years.
“Modern suppression doesn’t micro-manage. You can say what you what, as long as no-one is listening.” I don’t know of any Americans who are in prison for speech, though I can think of many obnoxious speakers I’d like to see in prison. The Constitution ties my hands, but on balance, that’s probably for the good.
“(The media) shouldn’t have a political focus at all.” Agreed. But human nature seems to prevent it. For example, the BBC is quite willing to criticized the government using leftist arguments, but I can’t recall ever hearing them criticizing their government from a right-wing perspective.
“(…that Saddam Hussein financed and trained terrorists..) is completely not true. Al Quada was one of Saddam’s biggest enemies.” Al Quaida is but one of many organizations dedicated to use of those tactics. The Soviet Union and its allies were training mid-east terrorists decades before anyone even heard of Al Quaida. If Bush had opposed only terrorists who target the United State — that would have been something to criticize.
America has tried a number of tactics in dealing with mid-east despots over the years, but whether we try to make friends with them (the Shah of Iran in the 1970s, Saddam Hussein in the 1980s) despite their ugliness and offer incentives to be a little bit better, or try to overthrow them (Saddam Hussen this decade), it seems we get condemned for our policy either way.
“The truth is, these terrorist aren’t going to stop until you overthrow the puppet in Saudi-Ariabia and stop financing Israel’s occupation of Palestine.” If we overthrew Saudi-Arabia, Al Kaida would definitely take over. Hamas says the (terrorist) war against Israel won’t end even if Israel leaves _all_ the occupied territories. (Again, I’m assuming people mean what they say.) The Islamic hostility to Israel is not based on occupation or opression, but rather on the insult to their political concept of Islamic Supremacy (bad news for Europe, considering the demographics).
Paul: “People hate Microsoft because they believe (wrongly) that their way is the only/best way and all other software pales in comparison. People hate Americans because they believe (wrongly) that their culture is the only/best culture all other cultures pale in comparison.” So how do Muslims feel about their religion? And how does that affect they way you feel about Muslims?
Paul’s points about America’s low-brow, ignorant popular culture are well taken. He adds “Essentially, a few hundred years ago, some puritans left for America because they thought they were better than everyone else and had the force of God’s righteousness behind them that gave them license to bring God’s justice to others as they see fit. It’s 2008. Nothing has changed.” Guilty as charged. Indeed it was the spiritual descendents of the Puritans in England and America who invented this notion that slavery is evil, and imposed that notion, first on their own countries, and since then have been trying to impose it on the rest of the world. For all their faults, I think the behavior of the Puritans and their descendents has generally been far, far better than the vast majority of the other societies at the time.
Matt: “The U.S. is one of the few nations to successfully commit genocide. Not so many whooping Indians around here any more (plenty of the turbanned ones around, but not the indigenous).” The Indians themselves did not have respect for women and children as noncombatants, so that was the way battles were fought. (Even the Geneva Convention rules only apply to wars against enemies sharing the commitment to those rules.) It was the Indian’s bad luck that after a few centuries of back-and-forth combat our war technology suddenly leaped. Within a few decades, however, we realized that the differential in power called for unilateral constraint.
But actually, most societies have genocide in their histories. Most of Africa was populated by cultural and ethnic Bushmen until the crop-growing Bantu expanded their territory to most of sub-Saharan Africa, exterminating most of the Bushmen in their path. Southern China was populated mainly be people more closely related to the Polynesians until the ethnic Chinese replaced them a few thousand years ago. Native American tribes occasionally got the upper hand over one another and exterminated their rivals. It was the Western societies that fairly recently developed the idea that this was wrong.
Matt: “In fact, I think the mosted despised tourist popluation is not American… It is Israeli.” Because of their ignorance of other people’s cultures? Because of their loud manners? Because of the unique cruelty with which they offer medical care to the women and children of their enemies? Because they defy the doctrine of Islamic Supremacy? Because they wouldn’t accept Yassir Arafat’s 1973 offer of an Arab-majority secular democratic Palestinian State (such as one could expect to create, considering the cultural mentality of such people)? Because leaders in countries where Israel’s tourists go find it politically savy to appease Israel’s enemies?
Matt: “BTW – there are plenty of us Americans who do know why the world should hate us… We are amazed that we are not hated more… Thank goodness for ignorance.” If that is true, then our best option is indeed to heed Ron Paul’s call to return to our pre-WWII isolationism, to withdraw from the world, imitating 20th Century Switzerland in the 21st century. But if, as others have said, the world’s other options are worse and they’re mainly frustrated that we’re just not better than we are, well, that would suggest to me that hatred of America _isn’t_ justified, and that your teachers probably hate America’s behavior for other reasons (e.g. our history of resistance to the communist expansionism).
re: Israeli Tourists
The people who loathed the Israeli tourists were the waitresses, the hostel owners, the restaurant owners who had to service them. This was just a sampling of course in my travels… but it had nothing to do with politics… it had to do with a young groups of soldier mentality, loud, obnoxious, bad tipping people travelling around 3rd world countries. Fortunately when U.S. soldiers go around, they superiors know to try to keep them on a short leash…
re: isolationism
Pax Americana is not only morally wrong, it is unfeasible. Ron Paul’s call is to lead by example and to influence with trade. Yeah those stupid Swiss, Swedes, and Finnish… those neutral countries are so hated by other countries… They are in fact some of the most appreciated tourists. They are some of the most responsible nations.
re: Western Moral Superiority
Are you serious? You don’t know crap. One of the funniest things is the current drug war. The Chinese tried to eradicate the use of hard core drugs in their country by stopping the British trading companies from selling it. The British and Americans fought several wars to force the Chinese to accept the trade of opium… Yeah – there is some moral superiority for you. The funny thing is that now, the U.S. and Britain have huge drug problems…
re: Western Moral Superiority
I can’t believe you actually think or suggest this notion… The indigenous populations may be have been more primitive, but to suggest that what they did to eachother even compares to events like the Trail of Tears (where our soldiers used disease ridden blankets to purposefully infect women, children, and elderly and force them to march in bitter cold with little food and shelter)…
re: Western Moral Superiority?
German eradication camps… WWI… WWII… Agent Orange… Bay of Pigs… Germ warfare… Chemical warfare… nuclear warfare… unprovoked wars… abu graib… institutionalized torture… apartheid… slavery… black oppression in the U.S… 5 MILLION imprisoned people in the US… Yeah – there is a whole lot of Western moral superiority going on… I’m not saying that other people don’t do crap, but there is no moral superiority on our part… I believe most of those examples are last ~50 years.
Matt: “The U.S. constitution stated that the non-whites are 3/5 of a man…” Yes, that was a compromise between the slave states who wanted their proportional representation in the House of Representatives to be based on total population including slaves, versus the anti-slave states which _didn’t_ want states to be rewarded with more power for having lots of slaves (insisting instead that a slave should count as 0% of a person). Which side would you have been on?
“Pax Americana is not only morally wrong, it is unfeasible. Ron Paul’s call is to lead by example and to influence with trade.” Yes, this was the position of the Isolationists in the 1930s. They argued that favoratism towards Great Britain in their war against Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany(lending money to Great Britain, selling them weapons, refusing to sell iron to Imperial Japan) would eventually get us dragged into WWII. F.D.R. didn’t listen to them, and we got dragged into WWII, just as the Isolationists predicted. I guess the only question is whether the Isolationists’ prescription would have led to a preferable outcome.
“One of the funniest things is the current drug war. The Chinese tried to eradicate the use of hard core drugs in their country by stopping the British trading companies from selling it. The British and Americans fought several wars to force the Chinese to accept the trade of opium… Yeah – there is some moral superiority for you. The funny thing is that now, the U.S. and Britain have huge drug problems…” I agree with you here. China was right, and we were wrong. The best think to do now is for the government to subsidize the sale of heroin and cocaine so addicts won’t have to steal to feed their habits, and criminals won’t make money off it. Let the cigarrette manufacturers diversify into this business.
“The indigenous populations may be have been more primitive, but to suggest that what they did to each other even compares to events like the Trail of Tears (where our soldiers used disease ridden blankets to purposefully infect women, children, and elderly and force them to march in bitter cold with little food and shelter)… ” It was my impression that the Trail of Tears and the disease-ridden blanked tactic happened at different times to different Indians, but I’ll have to tak your word on this. But actually, what primitive peoples did to one another was indeed far worse; in the Trail of Tears people at least had a chance to survive. Among primitive cultures, when one got the upper hand over its enemies the result was more like the Rowandan genocide. Extermination of the vanquished only began to die out when imperialist kings realized they could get more loot in the long-term by letting the vanquished live and pay tribute. (In a sense, kings began to lead wars for their own personal benefit rather than to help their commoners take over a competing people’s resources.)
Hitler’s ideology was a reaction against the humanistic progression of western society, in favor of a return to uninhibited savagery. His propagandists were quite explicit about this, claiming that one of the reason they hated Jews so much was Judaism’s imposition of conscience upon the world. (Not that the Hebrews 4,000 years ago were any less savage towards outsiders than anyone else in the region.)
Yes, when Western cultures did devolve into savagery it tended to happen in a bigger way — a result of having larger, more organized, more highly technical societies. For example, many societies at various times tried to exterminate the Jews, but no one came close until the task was attempted in the last century by a people strongly blessed by the usually-positive attributes of intelligence, precision, organization, persistance, and thoroughness.
I think the current romanticization of primitive cultures stems from the 1950s and 60s, when communism began to spread, not among the highly developed nations as Marx had predicted, but in 3rd World countries such as China, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Angola, Mozambique, etc. That lead Western Marxist subversives to seek opportunities for praising the 3rd World at the expense of western countries that were resisting communist “progress.” It’s not as though they cared about brutality in principle, considering their willingness to “break eggs for the sake of making omelettes.”
.Net versus Java arguement is simple.
Both are large languages with steep learning curves. You can’t pick up a book and get up to speed in a weekend and develop something. Visual Basic and C were easy to learn, build, and output something. A compiler and editor was all you needed.
After you spend your own time and money on classes, books, and IDE environments in .Net or Java, why go back and learn the other?
I’m a .Net guy. I think Java is very good too. But I doubt I’m going to learn Java if I don’t have to…unless someone gives me the incentive($$$) to do so.
@fsilber
where to start… where to start…
re: Trail of Tears
Was specific forced march by the U.S. on a the Cherokee nation where a significant portion of their tribe died… because of disease and exposure forced on the U.S. military. Similar events occurred to other native tribes, but this was the worst and the forced march referred to by the “Trail of Tears”.
re: Peace
Many peoples lived in relative peace and prosperity before they were invade by the Europeans. There are often groups of peaceful people who get invaded by barbarous invaders… India had relative peace compared to the brutal colonial rule of Britain. Sure some crap was bad, but Britain made it worse. I actually think the British are the most civilized of the imperialists – they could have chosen to be much more brutal. However, inadvertantly or not, they made a lot of long term problems by drawing up unnatural national borders and made up countries… hence many of the civil wars in africa (and even europe).
The mayans may have had human sacrifice – but it seemed to be far and few between… the spanish conquistadors killed off/raped off their entire nation. There are hardly any original peoples left… I dare conjecture that on an annual basis more people die in Texas gas chambers than did during mayan human sacrifice.
re: Hitler
Wow – I didn’t realize you could rewrite history like that so easily. Hitler came to be because the “West” was so brutal to the Germans after WWI… So, if by “humanist progression” you mean breaking their pride and will by taxing the hell out of their nation…
re: Judaism imposition of conscience on the world…
You must be a brain-washed seminary student. Do you know the story of gog/magog? The first historical capture of genocide? Do you know the story of the jewish tribe that was welcomed by a non-jewish culture, which the jews later tricked into getting circumcised and later all males were killed after the peace agreement? And no, this is not from NAZI propaganda – this is from the torah! What moral superiority do the jews have? Especially after their oppressive treatment of Palestinians… especially after they had gotten such poor treatment by the rest of the world… It pains me to think that a people who know what it means to be unjustly exterminated would treat another group like that… It made me lose my faith in humanity. Please educate me on how jews have moral superiority to any other group. (BTW – it is ok to own slaves according to the jewish religious texts)
re: 3/5ths clause – which side i would have been on…
Uh… many nations had already outlawed slavery at this point in history. I would have been on the side of the abolutionists.
re: isolationism/pacifism
This is a common misconception about us “isolationists/pacifists”. I think we have a better understand history and understand what it means to kill and to war. We would contemplate each scenario and in the event war is necessary, we often are among the greatest soldiers. I am a pacifist, but I would volunteer to fight a just war. I would have fought in WWII against the germans and japanese. I would have fought against the British in the opium wars. I would have fought with the Celts against the Viking and Roman invaders. I would have fought against the Egyptians against the enslavement of jews. I would have fought against the germans murdering the people in concentration camps (more russians died in these than jews and a greater percentage of the gypsies died than the jews, but we call it the Holocaust…) I would fight against Israel who are oppressing the Palestinians (there is no intelligent/meaningful way to prosecute this, so I do not). These are just wars. I would force no one else to fight with me. It is for each person to decide what they would be willing to die for.
re: Rwanda?
A major reason this happened was because the Europeans came screwed up the peoples and redrew national/tribal boundaries. Learn to watch more than Fox news.
re: History
LOL – you don’t think tribute existed until modern western nations figured it out? Almost every conquering nation from recorded history did this. From Genghis Khan, to Julius Ceasar, to Alexander, to Qin, to Ramses – they all collected tribute and did trade and generally did not exterminate a people (we’ve got some exceptions like Samarkand). Extermination (and utter destruction of society) of the vanquished was generally not done, except by modern Western nations. See again – Native Americans, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Celts, Australian Aboriginees, Hawaii, Guam, German concentration camps… Non-western nations have done these things as well, but no where near as frequently (see Taiwan, Philipines).
I’m not sure if you’re ill-informed or trying to spread propaganda – regardless, you are simply way off.
btw – .net is better than j2ee
[...] some of you may have noticed, one of my recent posts, Are .NET Developers the American Tourist of the Software Industry, was the scene of some vigorous debate earlier this week. Since I was a history major in college, I [...]
Matt, you said you would have been on the side of the abolitionists in the Constitutional Debate that resulted in the “3/5th compromise.” If the 3/5th Compromise is tantamount to equating a non-white to 3/5th of a man (as you claimed), then your sympathy for the abolitionists is tantamount to equating a non-white to 0% of a man (because that’s how much the abolitionists wanted slaves to count in distributing Lower House representation).
Obviously you don’t believe that a non-white is 0% of a man; so perhaps the 3/5th Compromise should not be taken as equating a non-white to 3/5th of a human being, either.
You claim that today’s brutal 3rd World genocide and mass-rape is the fault of the colonizing powers, who, in carving out these boundaries when giving these nations their independence, ignored cultural and tribal boundaries. Perhaps the resulting lingual, religious, and ethnic diversity within the emancipated ex-colonies is indeed to blame, but I wouldn’t have been the one to say so. Where I live, the dogma that diversity is wonderful is so well-entrenched that I wouldn’t have dared to make it the scapegoat for intramural 3rd world brutality. In doing so, you’re a braver man than I am.
Your other comments (not all of which I agree with) are generally off the point, as they do not contradict anything I said earlier. So I see no point in disputing them. I’m willing to let them stand without comment as representative of the clarity of the principles you hold.
[...] вот этой заметкой (англ). Следует отметить, что статья не является [...]
@fsilber, meneer, mike, et. al.
Did you notice that Russell wrote another post where he stereotyped us all into different categories of jackass?
After we take the time to read his post and give him some traffic… he calls us trogs, evil clowns, and blow-hards.
Can someone tell me which one I was at least? I thought I might be a an evil clown/trog?
I cannot be certain he had me in mind when he talked about the troglodytes, evil clowns, artful dodges and blow-hards showing up — since he didn’t quote any of my text specifically in that section. But if he did have me in mind, then I suppose I’d fall into the troglodyte category (based on the linked definitions).
A blow-hard presents his credentials to bolster his opinion. (Nope, I didn’t do that.)
Artful dodger changes the subject with a diversionary counter-attack. “(Evil clown) has little patience for in-depth discussions and will often disrupt exchanges between serious forum participants by introducing irrelevant topics, fatuous quips, and offhand comments. His greatest thrill is to taunt and humiliate weaker or more plodding Warriors with his snappy ripostes.” No, I don’t think I’m usually the one to change the subject using either tactic (though I don’t resist going along if someone else changes it).
“Troglodyte seems to have emerged from the mists of time untouched by human evolution. Devoid of a single progressive idea and lacking the slightest awareness of social and cultural advances, Troglodyte has developed an incoherent political philosophy that he characterizes as `conservative’ or `libertarian’, but which could be more accurately described as `bigoted narcissism’. His aggressive posturing often frightens off weaker, more timid Warriors. In pitched battle, however, Troglodyte easily loses control and his attack quickly degenerates into a rant.” I can see how someone who hates my reactionary conservatism might call me that, but I don’t think I postured agressively, lost control, or ranted.
Oh, well. I usually don’t respond to name-calling, anyway, if what I am or amn’t is irrelevent to the discussion.
By the way, Meneer R.: Would “Meneer” be a contraction of Mijn Heer, much as the French “monsieur” is related to the Middle English “Mine Sir” or “Madam” comes from “My Dame”?
>By the way, Meneer R.: Would “Meneer” be a contraction of Mijn Heer, much as the French “monsieur” is related to the Middle English “Mine Sir” or “Madam” comes from “My Dame”?
Correct. Its like sir/mister/monsieur. And the R is just the first letter of my firstname. I’ve learned a long time ago not to put my full name up on the internet.
>I can see how someone who hates my reactionary conservatism might call me that, but I don’t think I postured agressively, lost control, or ranted.
You were never aggresive.
>my reactionary conservatism
Is that it is? Although you obviously have different priorities, i don’t thinky our opinion is that extreme. It’s not the so much the subjective, but the seemingly objective part we seem to disagree. You believe your president and the american media, I believe the european media.
There was no link between 9/11 and saddam. Zero. That was a hoax. Pentagon even admitted that was no link.
There were no weapons of mass destruction. Nobody is sure if that was an intentional hoax though. _That_ could really just be a mistake. But we can at least saw that the certainty which with the president claimed that ‘fact’ was exagerated. He really wanted it to be true.
More importantly, if Saddam really had those weapons in a ready state, Iraq wouldn’t be attacked. (see north-korea).
The most dangerous aspect of the american democracy is that there are different versions of the truth. At least in Europe, the media is independent enough to not allow any politician to ‘play’ or ‘make up’ historial facts.
If I may feel as free to give you voting advise. Choose between the honest ones. Perhaps there is a lying politician (like bush) that appears to agree more with your political views. But can you really trust him? Your president took the right to ship people to guatanamo bay, to torture them and to not ever see judge. How could you possible still have freedom? How could you still a fair democracy?
Honestly, with all respect, voters like you have been played. You have been peopled. Misled. Deceived.
Spending of your government never has been higher. You never had more of your constitutation violated than now.
You are pro-guns because you want to be able to defend against a government gone bad. Well, the time is now. If you didn’t use it against this administration, i doubt you ever will defend yourself with that gun.
I strongly dislike the democrats’ notion of creating dependent groups by providing unearned resources. One of their fundamental notions is very flawed… I theoretically love the notion of communism, but the theory fails(ed) because of our innate selfish nature. Communism also seems to lead to very problematic implementations… I like much of the republican platform (even though I dislike many of their secondary postions), but words cannot describe how much I loathe the republican party. I’ve changed business partnerships, service providers, and car mechanics based on learning their political lean. If I saw someone with their baby in a burning car with a bush/cheney sticker, I would have to consider whether or not I would even call for help (I suppose I would have to try to help the baby – as long as there is no evidence that republicanism is not a genetic disease).
I think most of humanity shares a common ethos – let’s live and let live and try to help eachother when we can… Our politicians and media (republican/zionist owned) have obscured our commonality with crap to keep the common man confused and occupied with stuff that really doesn’t matter. If revolution breaks out, hopefully both sides can take a few minutes to take out the real trouble makers first…
I’m not sure voting matters – most of the time we must choose between an asshat with an R or an asshat with a D… And almost all of them are prostistutes to lobbying groups that do not have our human or national interests in mind. Actually, I apologize to prostitutes for comparing them to politicians – we need a new word so that I do not demean hard-working women.
>. If I saw someone with their baby in a burning car with a bush/cheney sticker, I would have to consider whether or not I would even call for help
You scare the shit out of me. How much of a biggot are you?
I wouldn’t likely vote for a republican, because i honestly think most of them are crooks. Some democrats are crooks too.
But people that vote for a republican might be confused. Maybe they just have different priorities in life.
In general, people like that expect their republican leaders to speak the truth, because they are like that themselves. Honest people with self-respect and honor. They are most easily fooled.
But you, you are full of hate. You judge people by their opinion and then you execute with your selective passifism.
Why pose such a threat? This people are just people. Maybe you neighbours. Somebody’s family.
Again, Matt, what is wrong with you? Please don’t get this the wrong way. But maybe you want to talk with some one about your anger.
You might end up doing something you regret. You might end up hurting the people around you.
You are correct in that I am very angry at our political situation. But the anger is directed appropriately. Anyone who does not share this rage is not paying attention to what is going on…
I think you mistake hate for something else… I believe that game theory scopes behavior in ethics quite well.
I can forgive a murderer – I don’t know their circumstances. I can try to empathize with an abuser – I don’t know their history. In either case, appropriate measures need to be put in place to punish the behavior and to protect others, but I do not judge these people.
I cannot forgive the people in power and those that have put them there. They consciously put in place a group who is responsible for the death of over a million people (American, Iraqi, and others). This does not count the physically injured. This does not count those who are emotionally scarred – either as abusers or abusees… They voted these people in power and they did it again… At this point, I don’t care about why they vote republican, all i know is that they are much like a disease and must be stopped. Anything that decreases that population is nice.
BTW – I’ve got friends who are republicans, but they are fine in my book. They voted their interests (they are pretty damn wealthy), and changed their vote when they saw what these people did. My political hero is Ron Paul… a republican…
Do you really think people are honest and honorable? If so why do we even need laws… (if it is just republicans who are honest and honorable – why do highly republican areas have greater afflictions of crime and religion?) Perhaps a more plausible explanation is that they are easily controlled by the tv and the great opiate. 2000 was decided by a margin of… gays cannot marry…
My dear poephol, I think you’re talk of uncontrolled anger is reflective (see your above posts).
>the anger is directed appropriately
>I can forgive a murderer
>I cannot forgive the people in power and those that have put them there
People that don’t lie and can’t image the tv lies to them?
Since when is naivity a sin?
>If I saw someone with their baby in a burning car with a bush/cheney sticker, I would have to consider whether or not I would even call for help
That is borderline murder.
>I’ve got friends who are republicans, but they are fine in my book
So, you would save THEIR baby. Nice.
>Do you really think people are honest and honorable?
Yes, most people are well intended civil beings. Some have less control over themselves as others, some are more intelligent as other.
I don’t live in your country, but if I did i would not be the type to vote on a republican. Most are crooks. But its much easier for me to see that from the outside. Our media outlets have no interest in my opinion about the US. They might have a local political bias, they have less of an international political bias.
I wouldn’t blame any american for not understanding what is going on. Its one thing to have media with different political biases, but it’s another thing if they completely contradict each other on factual information.
>2000 was decided by a margin of… gays cannot marry…
So, they have some issues to work out, like being homophobic. You are not helping them. You are just pointing a finger.
>My dear poephol, I think you’re talk of uncontrolled anger is reflective (see your above posts).
It wasn’t anger, but it was a bit of concern and shock, yes. You are a difficult person to debate with; you switch between real arguments and intellectual debate to name-calling, insults and threats.
So, obviously, you are not dumb. So be so rude or mean? What are you trying to achieve? Do you feel attacked?
If its all so important to you, if you think its all -that- bad, then why focus your energy on name-calling, insults and threats? The only purpose that could possible have is to make you feel better about yourself. That’s how much you really care.
Using ideology in an existential way is not healthy path. Try basing your self respect on how you treat people around you. Try to be the guy that does save that baby. You really can’t go on a moral highground because of political preference.
Because when you base your identity and self-image on your political colors, you don’t really want people to agree with you. If we would, we would be stealing your identity. If everybody agreed with you, you would have no reason to be ‘angry’ or ‘point at’ other people. You wouldn’t be able to distinguish yourself.
Maybe this is just speculation. I’m just trying to understand where your lack of manners originate from.
And there is nothing wrong with talking with somebody about that. It’s a lot healthier than going on blogs and claiming you want republican babies to die.
Meneer R.: “Your president took the right to ship people to guatanamo bay, to torture them and to not ever see judge. How could you possible still have freedom? How could you still a fair democracy?” Actually, the Geneva conventions say that when an enemy soldier is caught fighting out of uniform, it is proper for him to submit to summary execution. So any Al Kaida fighters sent to Gitmo who were captured while not wearing the official Afghani uniform were treated quite leniently, regardless of what happened to them afterwards.
“Spending of your government never has been higher.” That is true, it was a bitter disappointment. I do not, however, have faith that the Democrats would spend less. One advantage of military wastage is that we can cut back anytime without having to read horror stories about the resulting victims of the cutbacks. Once social spending is increased, however, people become dependent, and we can _never_ cut back without having to hear all sorts of horror stories about people thrown into sudden need and confusion.
“You never had more of your constitutation violated than now.” That is debatable, as I’ll explain below.
“You are pro-guns because you want to be able to defend against a government gone bad. Well, the time is now. If you didn’t use it against this administration, i doubt you ever will defend yourself with that gun.” Actually, as long as the government (however bad) respects the democratic process, use of guns against them would be a mistake. A _good_ revolution (as distinct from some sort of coup) requires massive public support, and if we had that right now we could simply vote for change.
As for corruption and lies, we have lots of financial corruption in both parties. The two cities I’ve lived in most recently, New Orleans and Memphis, have both been controlled by politicians of the Democratic Party, and we regularly hear of them getting caught in an FBI sting for bribery and going to prison. I can tell you of much more blatant lies I’ve been told by President Clinton. (And no, I’m not referring to his lies under oath about sex.)
As for my other Constitutional Rights being violated by the Bush admininstration, we’re talking about fringe cases. The most common blatant infringement of the average person’s Constitutional rights are done through intermediaries not _officially_ approved by the government, but tolerated by them. Consider these fundamental rights:
* Privacy in the home
* Control over one’s own body
* Freedom to travel
* Freedom from unwarranted searches and seizures
When a burglar is rooting around in my home, my privacy is violated. When I cannot walk public streets in certain places or at certain times without risking a mugging, my right to travel is violated. When a woman is raped, forced to choose between bearing an attacker’s child or killing her own unborn flesh and blood, her right to control her own body is violated. When I am robbed or burgled, my right to freedom from unwarranted searches and seizures is violated.
These at the most blatant and the most common violations of our Constitutional rights. When a government protects the lives of these attackers as they violate my rights by making me choose between defenselessness or prison — telling me that to save my own life I should submit obediently to a robber’s demands — such a government becomes an accomplice to these crimes. Morally, such a government is no different from the man who serves as a bankrobber’s look-out, no different from the rapist’s buddy who helps hold the woman’s arms down to prevent her from scratching at the rapist’s eyes while he rapes her. (That blindness is not an accepted punishment for rape is no justification.)
These rights are not satisfied merely by having laws against rape and robbery, nor is it a right merely to see a violator punished. Rather, we have the right not to tolerate being robbed or raped in the first place (nor to have to choose between that or death).
Until and unless the police can guarantee us mugger-free streets and burglar-free homes, we have the right and duty to defend these rights individually, and a government that tries to force us to tolerate these crimes is an oprressor.
If the police fear that a burglar might steal my gun, let them work harder to keep burglars out of my home (and discourage burglars from even trying by encouraging more people to shoot burglars).
Diversions…
Software Dev How Projects Really Work (version 2.0)…
[...] it is still thrilling for me to see one of my posts be widely read, my recent experience with a relatively popular post left me feeling as though I wouldn’t scale well in this respect if the number of comments I [...]
I was kinda surprised when I met a .NET/ASP developer today who, when he realised I had an iPhone, stated that I must hate ASP/.NET/C#.
No, they’re just tools.
What I hate is people telling me that I have to use certain tools without good reason. Like building stuff only to work with IE. Or even FireFox 2. And that includes stuff deliberately designed to work with Safari as well.
Microsoft just works extra hard at being loathed.
[...] trends, I start wondering why .NET developers get no love in the industry and end up writing a post comparing .NET developers to American Tourists. Although the post languished in obscurity for several weeks, it ended up getting over 30,000 hits [...]