Over the past year, an "ALT.NET movement" has sprung up. They have a wiki meetings. When it started out, it sounded like a good idea.
For those that aren't hip (read: not on twitter), ALT.NET has been a lightning rod in the community. The simple idea was "Alternatives in .NET" (not to .NET as one might assume from the name) - using the best tool for the job, wether it came from Microsoft or not. That means if NUnit was a better testing tool than MSUnit, ALT.NET would encourage NUnit.
A nice ideal, but in reality one man's "best" is another man's steaming pile of dung. Seriously, if developers could agree on the "best" of anything we wouldn't have 78 (by my last count) different tools all aimed at mapping a database to objects. So in practice, ALT.NET got into the name-calling, ego-bashing, and flame wars Internet forums do so well at. I still like the idea though, and didn't mind following along the ALT.NET crowd... that is until they started going to extremes.
I like meat (stay with me here). I recognize that McDonald's may not be the best quality meat, and may even be harmful to me. I'm interested in hearing about alternatives to McDonald's - but when talking to someone about this, the terms "vegetarian" and "vegan" come up. The logic seems to be because I agree McDonald's meat is bad, I must leave all meat.
Another example; when I was young I read C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity. He argued there is a God because we all share a common view of morality, and that this was something we knew and didn't need to be taught. I dug this, it made sense to me, so I agreed. The he argued that since we agreed on this God fellow, and Jesus was his son, we believe in his existence too.
Both of the cases show a "logic leap" in which we went from point A to point C and I don't recall stopping for lunch at point B during the trip. ALT.NET just arrived at point C for me with David Laribee's latest post on tools.
In the post, he makes the case for the "Developer Vegan" or what I'll now call "Degan" to drop back to the command line as the ultimate in process mastery. Now, there have been rants against the IDE before and while I do agree there are dangers and problems in using the IDE, I strongly disagree the answer is to toss the IDE aside.
I'm going to make this simple - Time is Money - a tool that saves time is better than a tool that costs time. If I can product an application in less total time (total time being time to launch and support) with Visual Studio than Vi, Visual Studio is the better tool. As a manager, if I train new hires in less time on Visual Studio than Vi, Visual Studio is the better tool. If my build process is "right click, select build" I save time by not having to train every developer on the build system, nor waste time configuring each workstation to be able to build the project.
Rather than attempt to ignore the reality of time and money, I would like to see suggestions and improvements made to the IDE. Address the weak points - if NUint is going to save time once setup, then ease the setup and integration - VS2008 supports a very flexible framework for plugins and extensions. Just because your audience is other developers does not allow you to exempt yourself from Agile goals and providing a solid user experience.
Bottom line, if ALT.NET is heading down this Degan path it is dooming itself to obscurity.
PS. I really dig vi, and have it on all my machines - I just don't require other developers use vi in order to work on my code.
Posted By Mike On Friday, April 04, 2008
Filed under developer |
Comments (7)
Jeff Barnes
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Friday, April 04, 2008
3:31:09 PM
"Rather than attempt to ignore the reality of time and money, I would like to see suggestions and improvements made to the IDE. Address the weak points - if NUint is going to save time once setup, then ease the setup and integration - VS2008 supports a very flexible framework for plugins and extensions. Just because your audience is other developers does not allow you to exempt yourself from Agile goals and providing a solid user experience."
Agreed. I don't have a problem with more focusedd and better tools, but I would like to see better integration with those tools from within the IDE. As more and more tools are added, it increases the amount of time I have to swap between them.
Walter "Mainframe" Lounsbery
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Friday, April 04, 2008
3:35:39 PM
Real programmers leave their card decks at the Mainframe Desk and bribe the operators with donuts to get their printouts first. Alternative? That would be Amdahl, right?
Justice~!
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Friday, April 04, 2008
3:43:40 PM
You make a great post that ties into a discussion on Nhibernate vs. EF that a bunch of us in Edmonton have recently been debating, the same thinking.
Dylan
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Friday, April 04, 2008
4:17:51 PM
FWIW, I think Lewis is a bad example. The first part of Mere Christianity is admittedly one logical leap to the next, but at least it's presented as "here's why I find Christianity logical and I'm not pushing you to agree." In fact, Lewis is very pragmatic. There's very little in the way of a "n-step plan to salvation" in Mere Christianity; rather, there's a lot of examples of how people grow in very odd ways. Which really figures in to your "whatever works, even if it's not the 'best' way to go about it" idea.
It sounds like ALT.NET (like any movement/fad/whatever in development) might be breaking the "programming shouldn't be about ego" line Nathan posted on twitter a while back. You can slide from developing a set of "best"* practices to elitism to name/technology dropping without realizing it. Refer back to the "Rails is a Ghetto" rant that made the rounds a while back.
Seems like there was another comment I was going to make, but I've been writing this in spurts.
* Well, "best" for a certain mindset. The term "best practices" seems to imply there's always one answer to everything.
Brian Sullivan
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Friday, April 04, 2008
4:39:48 PM
Totally agree with you. While Agile practices and the pragmatism of choosing the best tool for the job (regardless of its origin) are appealing to me, I feel that the negative, clique-ish vibe currently coming from the ALT.NET camp is a bit of a turn-off. I actually posted something about it myself recently (http://www.sullivansoftdev.com/blog/2008/03/12/AmbivalenceAndALTNET.aspx if you're interested).
Brad
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Wednesday, April 09, 2008
7:21:11 PM
My first introduction to alt.net centered on a consulting company trying to market a local product. It seems to me that alt.net type events can quickly become marketing events. Who determines if a product is helpful and then who determines which of the "78 different Mapping tools" gets discussed? The one that pays? The one that you have a relationship with? alt.net seems like simply another PR channel for 3rd party tools. Not a bad move.
