[codingthebeach]

Atwood was (is) a C# developer, and before that he was a VB.NET developer. These days he also does some Ruby and a bunch of other stuff. His initial MS/.NET focus and more generic usability rants were half the reason I started reading Coding Horror. Which is 100% of the reason why I joined the StackOverflow beta. And blogged about it. And rewrote my site from the ground up in one of the ASP.NET MVC release candidates.

You're correct that ASP.NET MVC was new at the time, but with guys like Scott Hanselmann comparing it to an acoustic guitar production versus WebForms more full-studio approach, and with Phil Haack on the squad, and with the corporate blessing from Microsoft and promises of future integrations, this was not some fly-by-night project that required a lot of faith to invest in. It was a clear case where Microsoft got something right, thanks to a small team of talented devs.

Consider: for the first time in history, you had the ability to write clean C# code in a web context with full control of markup and proper separation of concerns, sans cruft or baggage imposed by attempting to stretch a "desktop" metaphor over an request/response medium. Don't underestimate the psychological effect of this on programmers who'd been spending their days in the trenches builting line-of-business CRUD apps with ASP.NET WebForms and unbridled VIEWSTATE. So to me, ASP.NET MVC was the clear and obvious choice for StackOverflow. If you accept that, what better language than the C# he already knew?