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It's great that Scott and Dan took the time to respond to the bizarre rantings of Richard Grimes' final column.
Personally, I'm not going to write a big essay in retort. I think Richard's essay stands on its own, and proves only that he's out of touch. It sure seems odd that a fellow who's written books on .NET and a column for three years would leave on that kind of note. It was kind of sad.
My thoughts on his thoughts:
- The Size of the Framework - Sure, it's big. So was Win32, and so is sun.java.*. Programming isn't all Ruby on Rails, you know. :) The redist is 25 Meg? For what you get that's pretty cheap. That'll fit on any pen-drive and can be downloaded in a few minutes via broadband.
- The Framework is a Thin Wrapper on Win32 - Um, duh?
- VB and VB.NET are too different - Again, it's common knowledge that VB.NET isn't VB and vice versa. VB.NET exists to make former Visual Basic programmers comfortable, and to provide another, arguably simpler interface to IL.
Yes, he's cynical. All I know is that .NET has paid my mortage (and possibly yours) for a few years now, and I'm not too interested in complaining about a good thing.
About Scott
Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.
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But duuuude, .NET requires me to actually type code to get it to do anything. Can't I just tell .NET what I want?
"Ummm...I need you to manage some documents for me. Unnkay?"
"Ummm...I need you to manage some documents for me. Unnkay?"
Hey no fair! It hasn't paid my mortgage. I don't own a home, but still, wouldn't it be nice :-)
"Ummmm.... Yeah. If Peter can use .NET technology to do his job, it would be terrific, Okay? Thaaaanks." I caught ya haacked! hehe
Anyway, I wrote the whole response in Japanese to Mr. Grimes farewell notes... To sum it up, I just couldn't believe how shallow Mr. Grimes was in his farewell note after writing books on .NET.
Well, he obviously "took his job and shoved it!"
Anyway, I wrote the whole response in Japanese to Mr. Grimes farewell notes... To sum it up, I just couldn't believe how shallow Mr. Grimes was in his farewell note after writing books on .NET.
Well, he obviously "took his job and shoved it!"
Scott, since I saw your notice on Mr. Grime's article first, I'll reward you by dropping my comment here. :-)
I've sifted through hundreds of lines of comments on this DDJ article. It sure hits a lot of hot buttons for .NET people. Add me to the list of people that earn a living on this technology, but I'm not one of the angry ones.
Instead, my reaction concerns DDJ more than Mr. Grime's dissatisfaction. The column reflects badly on the depth and capability of DDJ. A column may be an opinion piece, but does an opinion piece of this nature fit with DDJ? It was a technical flamebait extravaganza. I like DDJs delivery of factual information across a working spectrum of computer science. But why publish this?
I've sifted through hundreds of lines of comments on this DDJ article. It sure hits a lot of hot buttons for .NET people. Add me to the list of people that earn a living on this technology, but I'm not one of the angry ones.
Instead, my reaction concerns DDJ more than Mr. Grime's dissatisfaction. The column reflects badly on the depth and capability of DDJ. A column may be an opinion piece, but does an opinion piece of this nature fit with DDJ? It was a technical flamebait extravaganza. I like DDJs delivery of factual information across a working spectrum of computer science. But why publish this?
The Framework is too big? Wrong, wrong, wrong. It's not big *enough*. (But it's getting bigger.)
I don't want to write plumbing code or generic code, or basically any code I can get elsewhere economically. I only want to write code that applies to the specific problem I'm trying to solve right now.
The most economic alternative possible is that the code is free, automatically available, and maintained by Microsoft. That means development, deployment, and maintenance are all essentially free!
I want more of that, not less.
I don't want to write plumbing code or generic code, or basically any code I can get elsewhere economically. I only want to write code that applies to the specific problem I'm trying to solve right now.
The most economic alternative possible is that the code is free, automatically available, and maintained by Microsoft. That means development, deployment, and maintenance are all essentially free!
I want more of that, not less.
Amen brother Billy! I don't want to, and my customers don't want to write plumbing or bolierplate code. We're in this business to solve business problems. I'll take that 25MB runtime anytime and my only hope is that theere will be more. More? Like Lonnghorn Shell APIs only exposed as managed code.
Scott, it's good to see you comment on this. I have waited out of respect for Richard. It's all too bizare for me. It's almost like an alien took over his body-)
Scott, it's good to see you comment on this. I have waited out of respect for Richard. It's all too bizare for me. It's almost like an alien took over his body-)
I've never heard anyone slam .NET, but I just can't stand it when people slam Microsoft. It's like you've said....NET has paid the bills. Taking that further, Microsoft has reaaaaaaaaally paid the bills. I'm not sure what the modern technological world would be like without Microsoft. I don't agree with their stance on backing Internet Explorer, I need they need a serious paradigm shift there and cave into Mozilla and start respecting standards and expandability and their search dept needs to trying to fight Google, but that's where I draw the line! DOS, Windows, Visual Studio, SQL Server, Works(for Win31, back in the day), Office, Mappoint (I LOVE THIS!), the Windows API, .NET, and yes, even the extremely anti-standards Internet Explorer up till 5.5 are/were just downright awesome applications and have helped us all get to where we are today. Without Microsoft and its technology, I can't really even see any industry being where it is today. It would be in the stone-age completely. Their moderation between the extremely hard to use *nix and the feature-less Apple is something to absolutely admire, not call "the worst of both sides".
The most amazing thing to me was reading his statement (paraphrased) "MS isn't using .NET to write their own products" about two days after reading Don Box state that Indigo is written in C#.
Yeah, Indigo is nothing important.
Yeah, Indigo is nothing important.
Wow! Not one person is willing to stick up for Grimes. I don't disagree with any of the points made in rebuttal, but I think he makes some very valid points on VB.NET. I've never heard a very convincing technical argument for the language to exist. As Grimes said, it appears to me to be more of a marketing initiative to "bring VBers along". What's more, I think it wastes resources at MS. I'd rather have one language (and VS project type) which incorporates all the features of C# and VB.NET, than writing in one and foregoing the extra goodies of the other.
Everyone seems to be jumping on his "size of the runtime" statement. I don't think he was saying it's too large to be workable as much as he was saying its size makes it less conducive to the cottage industry of shareware/freeware add-ons that VB spawned. I still think he missing the mark and the framework will only become more and more ubiquitous making this a non-issue (if it wasn't already), but I think he was ravaged a little harshly on this one.
Everyone seems to be jumping on his "size of the runtime" statement. I don't think he was saying it's too large to be workable as much as he was saying its size makes it less conducive to the cottage industry of shareware/freeware add-ons that VB spawned. I still think he missing the mark and the framework will only become more and more ubiquitous making this a non-issue (if it wasn't already), but I think he was ravaged a little harshly on this one.
When XP and Windows 2003 become ubiqutous, .NET size will not be an issue anymore.
Abdu
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BTW 'duh' link has one quote too many.