DeconstructingFowlerOnDotNet
In Martin Fowler's recent post related to Microsoft and Ruby, I am confused. Fowler seems to describe the .net world as a bunch of disillusioned alpha geeks and corporate programmers under command and control regimes who are standing on their side of the divide looking longingly at the greener grass that those Ruby and Agile guys get to play with.
Fortunately for us, he is very wrong. Having spent the better part of 14 years doing Microsoft based development, there has never been a time where I was more proud to call myself a Microsoft platform developer. The stuff coming from Anders Hejlsberg and the C# team, let alone the stuff coming out with the DLR and Silverlight, is some of the best innovation this business has seen in years. Which brings me to the first quote I take issue with:
"Reading the 'softie part of my blogroll I got a sense of real disillusionment amongst people who have been long-time Microsoft supporters."
Where do I start... LINQ, Lambdas, Expression trees, WCF, Workflow, WPF, Silverlight (again), IronPython, IronRuby, holy !@#$. A loud yawn? From whom? Certainly not from my clients or colleagues, who are salivating over this stuff. LINQ, more than Ruby, more than Java, will change the way we code - no other language since Foxpro has had this level of support for set operations directly in the language (yes, I know people that still do Foxpro, and they are laughing their *!#es off at how LINQ is a reinvention of what they have been doing for 20 years, but I digress).
It gets worse though:
"There's a growing sense that Microsoft's vision is armies of Morts in command-and-control organizations. There often seems to be outright discouragement of tools to enable talented enterprise developers, or of agile development processes."
Mort - as we all lovingly like to call him, cares about what he can do with technology, not the technology himself. He is busy, nose to the grindstone, working on problems that solve his company's problems in an agile way - agile in the sense of knowing when he can take a technical mortgage out and skip writing the tests first - if he is writing something used one time - or by adopting more of a TDD approach if it called for on the project. Mort is not a slave to dogma - be it Agile, or any other kind. And while Mort may be a little irritated with all the different SKUs for Visual Studio - it is somewhere between a minor irritation and non-factor - since most of what he needs to do is done in the core toolset anyway. The equivocation of Mort to "Command and Control" environments is, to say the least, specious reasoning of the "its different than the way I do it, so it must be bad" kind.
However, the statement that made me laugh out loud the hardest though, was this one:
"Ruby is not Yet Another .NET Language but a whole community and attitude to software development. Ruby is a community where open source, agile thinking, and lightweight solutions are deeply ingrained values."
Fowler is, in almost as many words, claiming Ruby is not a language, but a religion. Complete with values (commandments), a community (church), and a priesthood (himself, among a few others). I had to pick myself off the floor the first time I read that.
May I humbly submit that Ruby is, alas, a mere language. Just like C#, Java, Haskell, Lisp, Pascal, C++, and even... dare I say, VB. I can assure you that if Anders and company can come up with LINQ, they can figure out how Ruby works and make it work just fine on the DLR, if not probably superior, with better tool support, than what you can get today.
I know Fowler is a smart guy. The funny thing is that I agree with him on 98% of what he says about agile. But as it relates to .NET and Microsoft, it is clear that he polls his opinions from far too small of a sample (seemingly, people that want to tell him what he wants to hear). It is also clear - more than ever - that some people see Ruby as a religion and a movement. Just be careful when they hand you the glass of koolaid.