IT-Communities like Hacker News are full of assholes

I only found out about hacker news maybe... 6 months ago? This place is like 4chan for the IT-Community, and it's not the only place. The entire internet is full of assholes.

Filip Ekberg wrote an opinionated blog post a few days ago, about how he thinks C# is the past, present and future. After self promotion on Hacker News, I'm sure a lot of people do, such as myself. He got an out pour of comments.

"I am a Software Engineer working with various techniques such as C#, WPF, WCF, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET and much more"
"I spend most of my days working with the latest technologies from Microsoft."
"In the darkest alley-ways we still have the people not wanting to touch C# with a pitch-fork because it's behind Microsoft"
In my opinion he lacks enough neutrality to make that statements(how he know MS tech is so great if he is totally ignorant of other options?).
Instead of telling people to learn only Microsoft tech he could take his own advise and learn non Microsoft tech too. The world is much bigger than a single company.
In my work as a software engineer I had to use what was good for my company, not what was good for Microsoft, Apple, or any religion(GNU or whatever).
I had to use Java, C#, objective C, python, (and lisp and c and c++). We will never be in the hands of a single company ever.

He clearly works for MS and probably on the team that works on C#, which is why I find it odd that he touts Mono as a feature. If MS was serious about .NET everywhere, they'd sponsor Mono/Xamarin, or offer native .NET support for OSX and Linux instead of using the Mono community's hard work to toot their own horn.
C# is a great language and has evolved beautifully, but many people will still continue to avoid it because it's owned by MS and stuck on Windows (without the help of Mono). The next Google, Facebook or Twitter won't be written with C#.

I would like to try it out but I'm not on Windows obviously, and I won't work to become a second class citizen ("What do you use? Mono? That's not supported").
Also, most of tooling seems to be proprietary, Windows-only too.
So I'd stick to JVM.

He's a junior MVP, of course it has to look like an ad :)

These are just some of the comments that appeared on Hacker News.

The IT-Community is a joke, that we as a collective community spanning 100's or 1000's or more, platforms, languages, frameworks etc, have to resort to personal attacks, and the same old generic bullshit arguments despite how far anything progresses.

I don't think I'm immune to all this, as a .NET Developer I rant against Microsoft for the stupid things I think they do, I don't like ASP.NET MVC after playing with other frameworks that the .NET Community has some up with, and I'm always ranting about how shit Entity Framework is, but I'm not personally attacking someone or singling out an entire framework just because it was developed by a single company.

Everything has it's pros and cons, but a con isn't "OH it's developed by Apple" or "Oh it's created by Microsoft", a con isn't "It's a clone of Java" that's all just your ignorance bleeding through.

Yes C# is created by Microsoft, does that make C# bad? No. Does it mean you shouldn't learn it? No.

People need to stop being so negative towards others in the community, if someone has an opinion like Filip, and you disagree, come up with a constructive argument about why you disagree. You may teach Filip and the community something! Hell, someone might respond to you and you may learn something in return!

The good in the community is when we learn from each others ideas and discussions, whether it's Microsoft creating LINQ and everyone mimics it in other languages the best they can, or the Ruby community coming up with Sinatra and it being the inspiration for NancyFX in the .NET community.

Stop being an asshole just because you can be anonymous on the internet.

comments powered by Disqus