Comment by ScottWhigham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ScottWhigham | Hacker News Reader

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There's so much "Yes!!!!" in your post, I wish I could upvote you 100 times. The only thing I'd add is that you've glossed over the cost a bit. If I want to use Python, for example, in production at my established 100+ person company, the cost is $0.00. If I want to use C#, the cost might be zero as long as I'm willing to put up with missing features (Express Edition, Sharp Develop). If I want the full IDE for with Visual Studio 2013, I have to pay $600 for a standalone copy, or $1800 for MSDN, etc. And guess what? In a year or two, the new version will come out and I'll only get a 25% discount to upgrade (VS2012 vs. VS2013). And those versions don't include lots of the team features - that's just the basic IDE.

And don't get me started on the never ending stream of TLAs coming out of Redmond that get hyped for 3 years and then discontinued later for another TLA.

It should probably be clarified that you're talking primarily about start-up costs, and primarily about web applications. I think amortized over the long run, MS services can save you money (definitely at the enterprise level, less so with small teams). Not always, but I've seen many teams hack away on Python or Rails, and hit a giant wall about 80% of the way in. Enter a consultant to save the day (spoken as a past freelancer who charged pretty decent rates for this kind of work). Of course that can happen on the MS stack too, but you can get support from MS with MSDN. Volume MSDN licensing is not cheap (though, free with Bizspark), but considering you get a full suite of MS products it is a no-brainer when developing anything on the Microsoft stack. I think there's some debate left in regard to web applications, but when it comes to desktop software dev or SOA, there's not really a viable alternative. In the end, it costs good money, but you get really, really good development software.

Also, I'd say that I'm more than willing to pay good money for VS, if it means not using Eclipse. I would easily lose $600 worth of time trying to get open source development tools to play well together. Microsoft's IDE technology is so far beyond anything in the FOSS world it's not even a debate anymore. Only mod it needs is Resharper. :)

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