[woogychuck]

Hey Bad_User (if that is your real name),

Just to back up what I wrote in the article.

I've worked with 2 start-ups. Both had a major feature release every 4-6 months with minor releases every month or two. At Piehead, most of our projects are less than 2 months from client sign-off to launch. Based on talking with other developers in the Boston area, these timeframes seemed pretty similar to what they were seeing at start-ups and agencies.

I didn't list a huge number of start-ups because I felt the post was getting a bit long and didn't want to jam a bulleted list of start-up names in the middle of the article. There are about 20,000 start-ups listed in the BizSpark directory. Granted, they aren't all web start-ups, but I've only got 5 fingers on one hand and I bet there are more than that in the directory. If you want to see a bit about running a web startup on .NET, the guys at http://www.stackoverflow.com have posted lots of articles outlining the pros and cons they've encountered.

It's also worth noting that almost everybody is a follower in the tech world. PHP and Ruby both evolved from Perl. MVC was in use before half of us were even born. In the end, these are just tools and the power comes from what we build with them.

You use the phrase "all evidence is to the contrary" a lot. If you only see evidence supporting open source tools, you're likely not looking too hard. There are pros and cons to both ecosystems and blindly tying yourself to either one will only hurt you in the long run. My main point was that many developers make decisions based on opinions not facts, and your comments seem to re-enforce that. If PHP, RoR, Django or some other platform is best for your project, use it, but don't hide behind hyperbolic psudeo-facts.

[palish]

Don't word your responses so harshly. It discredits you.

[woogychuck]

Sorry about that. It was a bit passive aggressive.

[bad_user]

     I've worked with 2 start-ups. Both had a major 
     feature release every 4-6 months with minor 
     releases every month or two.

Great, so you've extrapolated your experience to the whole ecosystem. I'm not saying that at Piehead you don't build websites at a faster pace than others, but even if you do, it's a selection bias, since you're only comparing others that are similar to yourself.

Here, I'll give you an example - suppose you want to do natural language parsing, a fairly hot topic these days. Try finding me supporting libs that would do that and that are better documented or mature than NLTK (the Python library), which doesn't work on IronPython btw.

     didn't want to jam a bulleted list of start-up 
     names in the middle of the article

That's too bad, as it would have done more for the point you were trying to make than all the other blabering you wrote.

     almost everybody is a follower in the tech world

Yes, but most valuable projects also add things of value that the original projects didn't.

How's the deployment story these days for .NET? Does it have something like Capistrano yet? Why should I use a half-baked clone of Ruby on Rails, when I can go for the real deal and have thousands of cool plugins to choose from? Why should I use NuGet when you can have the really mature Debian repository and rubygems.org/CPAN/PyPi?

     PHP and Ruby both evolved from Perl

Both innovated in certain ways over Perl, I'm not advocating for revolutions. In both cases you can see clear benefits that those languages / ecosystems provide over Perl.

That's not the case with .NET - it's a proprietary technology, having all the cruft of Java, while not having all the benefits of Java - like a strong community or integration with anything under the sun.

     MVC was in use before half of us were even born

Funny you mention that, because ASP.NET is not MVC. It also makes you jump through hoops to have MVC, mostly because of that braindead postback mechanism.

And not all MVC frameworks are created equal. If you can't see the benefits introduced in ASP.NET MVC that were copied from others and that weren't in existence when half of us were even born, then there's no point in debating any further.

     There are about 20,000 start-ups listed 
     in the BizSpark directory

Then what was your blog post about?

     There are pros and cons to both ecosystems

You aren't showing me any pros of .NET, and that was my whole point. Article is vague and filled with hyperbole.

     If PHP, RoR, Django or some other platform is best for
     your project, use it, but don't hide behind hyperbolic 
     psudeo-facts.

Well, hyperbolic pseudo-facts are countered best with hyperbolic pseudo-facts. Am I right or what?

[blackman]

I think you have not seen the latest Asp.net MVC 3, it is pretty much something like rails.