[lujim]

50% smug developer snobbery and 50% truth. As much as I hate to admit it, it is easy to be mediocre in the legacy webforms world of .NET and a lot of places are stuck in that world. To some degree that speaks to the success of ASP.NET allowing decent programmers to double as mediocre web developers. I was one for a long time and am still one some days.

I think the MVC, Entity Framework, Web Api world of .Net is as good or better than anything else out there and a 'good' developer in that world is just as accomplished as a 'good' developer in the Django or Rails world.

I would also argue that it has proven much more challenging to maintain and extend legacy .Net applications than it was to work on a clean, solid, and in many ways more complicated Django/Postres/Ubuntu stack. Keeping a beat up winforms,webforms,soap driven SOA legacy stack straight takes a decent amount of patience.

[tracker1]

I'd add WCF to that list as well, especially when the client and server are both in .Net languages... I never really liked the XML binding, and preferred to use programmatic binding, and generally with JSON endpoints... but the ability to distribute a simple class library of interfaces, that could then build a WCF client instance and connect to a given endpoint is really nice. The painful thing to me was always consuming ill-defined services written in other languages.

I always hated webforms, to be honest, before MVC, I'd usually write as simple aspx as possible, and use ashx for most of the edges... The first couple releases of ASP.Net got better, but still the disconnected events were somewhat more painful than straight html+js when it came to anything complex, more so as ajax took hold. MVC made those edges easier to write. For the past 5 years or so, been writing far more node.js, and though less polished than .Net on the server, has been far more pleasant.

[HillRat]

The problem with the OP is that it can be summed up as "writer doesn't want to work on legacy systems." Good for him! But the amount of greenfield development is a minuscule slice of SLOC out there in the world.

Context matters. I've seen "derpy enterprise shops" build lambda architectures on Azure, startups cargo-culting their way through MEAN-stack apps, and, yes, LoB apps that were still Java-through-CGI (shudder). You can be a great developer in virtually any language, in virtually any environment. Or, I suppose, you can bitch about it on your blog.