Comment by swombat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by swombat | Hacker News Reader

I hadn't read the original diatribe, but in this article I finally read it:

The reason most people want to program for the web is that they're not smart enough to do anything else. They don't understand compilers, concurrency, 3D or class inheritance. They haven't got a clue why I'd use an interface or an abstract class. They don't understand: virtual methods, pointers, references, garbage collection, finalizers, pass-by-reference vs. pass-by-value, virtual C++ destructors, or the differences between C# structs and classes. They also know nothing about process. Waterfall? Spiral? Agile? Forget it. They've never seen a requirements document, they've never written a design document, they've never drawn a UML diagram, and they haven't even heard of a sequence diagram.

Now I know I can dismiss this "Michael" fellow as an imbecile. Whatever point he may have, will no doubt be made more cogently some other day, if it's worthy of debate. I'll think about it then.

Well put. And the UML at the end is the cherry on top. But the striking thing about the post, which I had to go read [~], is how insular it is. He's saying obviously false things, not out of stupidity per se, but out of a false worldview. He's embedded in an environment that confirms this worldview back to him, so it doesn't seem false. (There's a dim awareness of reality in one comment, though: "where are all those awesome WPF applications I’ve been waiting for?")

Viewed this way, the rant is fascinating. It's the Microsoft equivalent of an IBM mainframe guy in the 1980s ranting against PCs. Of course Microsoft are doing things on the web today, but IBM was a leading PC vendor then too.

The post is the best thing I've seen shedding light on MS culture vis-à-vis the web. Culture is a hard thing to change. If the post is representative, MS are in big trouble. Perhaps they will reinvent themselves. They did it in the past, as we know. But they had quite different leadership then.

[~] http://michaelbraude.blogspot.com/2009/05/why-ill-never-be-w...

I had to learn about the development process, requirements documents, design documents and UML for a software engineering class I took this year, and the project in which we had to apply everything we learned was web-based and written mostly in javascript.

As a C# developer the irony for me was that just about everything he mentions is available in a web environment via Silverlight and ASP.NET. So it's odd that this diatribe would come from someone who works for Microsoft.

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