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Comment by tejaswiy | Hacker News Reader

This is what I don't get. ASP.NET scales pretty well as Joel opines. Why do people think .NET is bad just because it feels enterprise-y?

More: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWHfY_lvKIQ

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My beef with ASP.NET is that it makes it disturbingly easy to write code that doesn't scale well and then is ridiculously hard to scale after the fact.

It really is all about the initial design not the language. ASP.NET just makes it too easy to go with bad design and library choices, not to mention the tons of examples of bad design that newbies might accidentally follow at the beginning.

My beef with ASP.NET is that it makes it disturbingly easy to write code that doesn't scale well and then is ridiculously hard to scale after the fact.

Explain? Example? I don't see how this could possibly be true for .net but not for Rails or Python or PHP or whatever.

I think what noonespecial is probably getting at is that because .Net is usually written in Visual Studio a lot of people stick applications together in a RAD approach without giving much consideration for what is happening under the hood. Not all, of course, but probably a larger proportion that for platforms that don't have tools with RAD features like Visual Studio.

WebForms in ASP.Net are pretty much an attempt to take the developer experience of Visual Basic and make it work on the web - arguably with mixed results.

I really don't think there is anything wrong with .Net as a platform - but things like WebForms can be rather disturbing if not used with care.

The 'mixed results' you mention is no different from any other web platform on the planet.

I'll have to agree with this... but its worth noting that there's a difference between ASP.Net WebForm and ASP.Net MVC.

I'm a huge fan of .Net (in fact my startup runs on it) but I absolutely hate the 'magic' that WebForms does for you.

Of course, you don't have to use the magic of WebForms (as I'm sure you know). You can use it just like 'MVC' where the code-behind class definition is the controller. In fact, now that I think about it, the big difference is that the controller-view mapping is static in WebForms (with code-behind) and dynamic in MVC (method loads a view).

Too true. The debacles I've been involved in that caused me to post the above were all hastily constructed WebForm apps at their inception.

Isn't this true of any language? ActiveRecord associations in Ruby on Rails are brilliant for getting code out the door, but the queries it produces along with complex lazy loading can make a database melt.

Thanks -- it's such a good talk. The final Q&A section of the talk is the best Q&A I ever saw. Aside of tons of insights Joel was gently picking up on Googlers (e.g. by doing search using Bing).

You're right, .NET (even though I despise it) scales as well as anything else. Scalability is much more about design decisions than language/platform choice.

However, Joel Spolsky is a tool. Everyone I know and respect thinks he's a tool. He is a prime example of being successful because of being lucky, rather than being good. Do not quote Joel, he can't form a valid argument for a topic without circling back on himself to save his life.

Whether Joel Spolsky is or is not a tool, lucky, good etc is completely irrelevant. He and the rest of the SE/SO team has built a highly scalable solution based on .NET. So in a discussion about scaling on .NET, it absolutely makes sense to listen to his experiences.

Actually, FogBugz is trivial to scale - there is never any more than a few dozen, to hundreds of users for any one project.

And Copilot wasn't even envisaged or created by Joel, but was rather a project created by some interns.

FogCreek doesn't innovate (they have a bug tracker and a remote support application based on VNC). Joel just happened to be one of the first to blog constantly about technology. He doesn't even allow comments on his posts because he doesn't want to have to deal with people contradicting him (not that he doesn't do an excellent job at this himself).

There are so many great developers and businesses out there that you could use as an example to model your business and software on. Use them, not Joel. Let Joel's business and opinions fade away as other smart, innovative companies run rings around his ageing product suite.

SE/SO == "Stack Exchange/Stack Overflow"

Someone approached hiwith the idea for that product, it wasn't his.

Besides, this is a perfect example of him contradicting himself about how taking VC is a bad idea.

Besides, do you think they are profitable yet? How do you think they will get there without heading down the Expert's Exchange track? And let's not forget how much chaff is now being added every day to these sites, it now seems to be impossible to ask a difficult question because only relative newbies seem to be the only ones answering questions.

Joel wrote the spec for Copilot, so it's a little unfair to claim he had nothing to do with it.

At the other end of the spectrum of possibilities Joel's team at Fogcreek developed their own platform:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01b.html

So I would say that he's actually got a pretty interesting perspective on choosing technology platforms for web applications.

Actually, that article is one of the most interesting and useful examples to point to when discussing the insanity that is Joel. That solution is just so ridiculous.

His software runs on a compiler that has had 2 months work put into it and worse, it compiles to either VBScript or PHP.

It's probably the most counter-intuitive solution ever implemented to solve the problem of needing a web-based application to run on both Windows and Linux.

Except when it came time to move to .NET/Mono, they only had to update their compiler to generate IL instead of rewriting the whole app from scratch. Sounds smart to me.

Except they are still stuck with any badly implemented language "features" in their own language that they only spent 2 months on. Language design and implementation is hard, just ask the dozens/hundreds of full time developers that work on ruby, java, php or .net itself.

Do you have inside knowledge of their framework? Did you know wasabi has memoization and heap of other things frameworks like .NET don't even have? They spent a lot more than 2 months on Wasabi. I think your information is outdated.

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